HYDERABAD: Errant motorists who turn a blind eye towards road safety rules and indulge in jumping the signal, over-speeding, not wearing helmet, and do not fasten the seat belt besides violating several other norms, will now be taken to task by the Hyderabad traffic police, with the new Automatic Number Plate Recognition System. For the first time in the country, the city traffic police as a part of Integrated and Intelligent Traffic Management System are all set to launch the ANPR system by the end of September.
In 2017, the city traffic police booked as many as 27 lakh motorists through non-contact penalty mode, e-challan and collected as much as Rs 13.20 crore as penalty, while over 19.17 lakh motorists have been penalised till June this year. The enforcement was done through e-challan, mostly because of the captures of the CCTV cameras installed at the traffic signals and also by the traffic police personnel using the electronic devices.
A few junctions, where the ANPR is being tested are KBR park, Indira Park, Srinagar colony, at some places in Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills. The system could detect at least 40,000 violators in one day, which also includes the motorists riding in wrong route, or using the mobile while driving. With the new system coming into the place, the police officials opined that they would detect more violations automatically who would be penalised, and further counselled to bring traffic sense.
Anil Kumar, Additional commissioner of police (Traffic) said, “The new system will identify the registration number of the vehicle accurately and generate a challan by identifying the violation. Checking errant motorists now is being done by the traffic personnel, who dedicatedly work on this, but the ANPR system will do it without any human intervention.”
He shared that the police of various states are trying implement the ANPR system, but Telangana would be the first State to adopt and implement it. “Currently, the system is under testing. We are trying it at 12 different junctions so that it can be started at the 350 junctions in the city,” said the additional commissioner.
When contacted, Dheerendra Samineni, a city-based road safety expert said, “It is good that we are using technology for detecting violators. But, we should also create awareness amongst the motorists about the road safety to avoid inconvenience to others.”
The technology detects manual intervention after capturing a photo and the intelligent program will detect the violation by comparing it against the database. It will then automatically generate the challan and upload it to the violator’s profile. The developed system first captures the vehicle image. Vehicle number and character are extracted using the image segmentation and optical character recognition techniques. Then it will check with the database program if there is any violation. Once the vehicle owner's name and place of registration is detected, an e-challan is issued.”
