Prof. Edward Chin-shin CHUNG, Professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at PolyU, has recently signed a licensing agreement with Parking Systems Limited (PSL) for using his and his research team’s patented License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology and software for automatic car park access control. The software is now in production phase at the PSL car parks.

Their LPR technology contains computationally efficient algorithms and computer vision AI models that search for the positions of licence plates and subsequently extract the correctly ordered licence plate numbers. It is designed and tested to perform well in extensive adverse conditions, such as high-speed vehicles, dim environments, the camera being flashed by vehicle head lights, blurry views caused by dust and raindrops and rotated camera views.

To facilitate the “Southbound Travel for Guangdong Vehicles” arrangement of the HKSAR government, the LPR technology previously developed for the Hong Kong licence plate format is now upgraded to include the Chinese Mainland and Macao formats.

Building on the LPR technology, a software for automatic car park access control was developed and integrated into PSL’s car park management system through an application programming interface (API). The parking software also includes a graphical user interface (GUI) designed for car park management and is featured by extended functionalities, including (1) detection of vehicle retreat (without entering the gate) and reverse vehicle access, (2) dual camera channels for enhanced robustness and accuracy, and (3) camera anomaly detection for shifted, rotated and blurred camera views.