I only have 1300 so far. Those are some crazy numbers. Really makes me think about the crowdsourcing potential - I'm not sure exactly what that would look like.
One thought that came to mind was keeping a daytime image for each plate. Especially from the front, lots of times we see decent facial ID through the windshield. That could definitely come in handy.
--
While thinking about this, an idea I was exploring many months ago came back to mind. Listening to and logging 300-400MHz radio signals near your road. Why? Tire pressure monitors. TPMS sensors all have a unique ID and send their reading to your car wirelessly with no encryption. This signal can be received from up to something like 50 feet away.
So what does this mean and why might someone want this? Well, if your vehicle of interest is smart enough to take its plate off, you're kind of SOL, at least at night when you don't have much else to work off of, like a vehicle description. The device IDs of a vehicle's TPMS sensors could serve as a secondary piece of identifiable information in situations where we aren't able to capture a license plate. By capturing both, the TPMS ID's can be associated to the license plates of the cars that they came from. So, if a vehicle first passes your property at some other time with its plate mounted (which I would guess happens in the majority of cases), be it earlier that day, 3 months earlier, or even after an incident occurs, the system will still have sufficient data to identify the vehicle even with its license plate removed...
This is obviously getting way more into the weeds, but I've had so many incidents and am so paranoid now that I just might do it. I also just think it's fascinating to think about the fact that you could. Could easily be set up with some basic equipment for no more than $100-300.
github.com
www.kaggle.com
