In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to the Roseville [CA] Police Department.
Roseville police found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of those alerts.
Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, described Roseville’s misread data as “stunning.”
“A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale,” he told Business Insider, referring to Roseville’s reported error rate for stolen and felony vehicle alerts. He added that “in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities.”
How can they suck that bad? A 29€ raspberry pi with a basic ML model can get 90% accurate results
That’s probably exactly what they did, deployed a sbc + some off the shelf model and increased the price 300x by making a black plastic shell.
The trick isn’t the actual tech, it’s the connections and sales pitch.
I guess that they are implementing crappy cameras? Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:
Note how each letter is unique and can’t be transformed with a sharpie into another. That also makes OCR easy. If you use a crappy dashcam, you will get problems regardless. Esp. in low light situations at higher speeds.
So I would guess that Flock uses cheap sensors and cheap lenses. Which kind of makes sense when they are putting out thousands of scanners.
in my area I struggle to distinguish D, O, and 0. Idk if someone was paid to design that, but they did an awful job
Never seen letters like that on license plates in Quebec.
The C could be definitely be turned into the G pretty flawlessly.
Not without some whiteout though, notice how the stroke gets thinner as it curves upwards?
Oh yes I see
Yeah I don’t think that is the real license plate typeface. I think that might be a font called Sauerkraut that is a riff on the official one.
Actually the tops of the C and G are different, but you’d have to be looking for it. Plater readers could probably still be fooled.
You’re assuming that all people in the pipeline are competent