Rescue Plate

Rescue Plate allows law enforcement to find and track license plates of potential criminals.

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Inspiration

in a year there are 800'000 abductions and over a million carjackings. Stories describing the difficulties cops have when it comes to locating vehicles connected to crime inspired us to create a way to find criminals more efficiently and faster than ever before.

What it does

Rescue plate is an example of a governmental system that uses the front cameras of cars to actively scan license plates on the road while making comparisons to a criminal database. Our app alert cops if the car is related to an active crime along with it's last seen location. As of now, cops rely on Amber Alert type notifications and hope that someone may see and report a plate number, however, they often go unreported. With Rescue plate, a cop will be alerted as soon as a car's camera captures a criminal license, know where the car was last seen, and track it's movement via google maps. This can help with kidnappings, car jackings, and much more.

How we built it

Rescue plate uses Google's vision API to collect a plate number which is then entered into a firebase database. Next, that data is output into an HTML based website (partly assisted by bootstrap CSS & JS) which simulates what a cop would see. The webpage displays the license number, criminal status, and latitude and longitude, which coordinates are pinned on a live Google map in either red or blue depending on criminal relation clearance.

Challenges we ran into

Training our models to detect just license plate characters. Some challenges included adding multiple pins on google maps, selecting only the relevant information on a license plate, and formatting the CSS to show properly on all platforms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud to have finished with time to spare, create a professional and sleek website, and making the hardware and software communicate properly and integrate well.

What we learned

We learned how to embed google maps and use some of its special features, how to scan license plates using regex, how to manipulate bootstrap code, and much more.

What's next for Rescue Plate

We can see rescue plate being used to track not only license plates, but suspect's faces through facial recognition with cameras around town.

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