I've been thinking about this for some time and decided that I really should write about it. Its a little big brother-ish, but potentially in a distributed way.
Here's the genesis of my idea: I live on a reasonably small road that twists and turns, but my house is on a reasonably straight portion of that road. As a result, cars often go whizzing by at speeds far in excess of the posted 35 mph limit. I'd like to dissuade people from doing so.
Proposed system: A simple box likely consisting of an off-the-shelf point and shoot camera, a low power laser, a tuned (i.e., focused on detecting the reflection of the laser) photo sensor and a raspberry pi or an arduino. The system works best if it is connected to the internet full time, perhaps through a focused wifi antenna back to the house.
The laser pulses multiple times a second and determines of there is a car in the camera field of view. If there is, the speed/direction of the car is measured from the difference in the location of the car over time. Probably just use an average of a couple of readings when the car is in the optimal location.
When the system determines that the car is in the optimal location for a license plate reading, the camera snaps a picture, focused on the license plate area. The picture and the speed/direction information along with the time-stamped photograph would be sent to the cloud for processing. The key would be to pull the state and license plate number from the picture. Better would also be to pull the make and model (more data has to be worth more money).
At first the raw pictures could be posted publicly on a website where citizens could just focus on shaming speeders or allowing parents to check in on their kids speeding habits (really anybody could check on anybody if they knew the license plate information).
My understanding is that the courts have made it clear that this is not private information - police cars routinely drive down the road with picture scanners looking for cars with outstanding parking tickets on them. The same could be accomplished by just sitting in your front yard with a camera - the device is just making it much easier to do systematically.
One Step Beyond: Charge for access to the processed data. This could serve private investigators (PIs). They could subscribe to the site for $10/month and get access to locations of a certain number of license plates. For a premium service, they'd be able to set up a geo-fence around a location and get a text on any hits in real time (location and direction). Eventually, home-owners could get a small payment for hosting the devices based on the revenues from the subscriptions. Yes, I'm guessing the NSA would harvest this information with or without permission (but I'm sure that the company would rather get paid for it).
The value of subscription clearly goes up as the number of people providing data goes up. Business owners on busy streets could post these on their signs. Homeowners everywhere that are annoyed with speedy neighbors could provide their data to the police as justification for increased speeding patrols. As a bonus add-on, you could create an iPhone app and let people take geo-coded pictures in parking lots to record the location of vehicles. I don't know if it would be worth too much (and mall / shopping center owners would like become sensitive to it), but you could pay per data point.
I have a great spot near the road that has power. If I get motivated, I may just try to hack this system together.
No comments:
Post a Comment