 Hi, I make fly I am now living in Rotterdam as I was nicely introduced to Yeah, I'd like to give I'm German But I'd like to give this talk in English and that has a reason that is actually kind of outside of this conference I'm living now in the Netherlands and have to deal with those Systems a lot more often than you have to deal with those here in Germany And I'd like to be able to drag the video of the talk under to the nose of some people who thinks they they are a good idea So is anybody having an issue with me having the talk in English? Okay, nice So let's talk Jot about me as I was introduced I used to live in I studied in Damstadt. I used to live in work in Hamburg. I now live in Rotterdam, which is in the Netherlands and in Actually, really also in Holland It's pretty nice there I can recommend that I can also recommend moving there and working there mmm, it's a pretty nice environment Dutch is Easier than I thought even though my Dutch is not very good yet So I'm today giving a talk about the automated number plate reading system. So What is that? So it's automated That basically says in this whole process in the normal case, there is no humans involved and more and more also in the more edgy skate edgy cases there are no humans involved because There's usually not a lot of humans working there anymore The number plate the number plate the number plate is what the systems focus on so there are several systems to try to identify Several objects out there in the wild by the government face recognition. There's another one possible attacks on RFID cases also this focuses on number plates that is in this case really the things in the front of your car and The recognition a lot of this technique technology SAS. It's very reliable I think it's not that easy So what what does it do it basically? Takes a picture of your car that is triggered through a magnetic coil Runs OCR software on this picture and Compares that to a database It's a simplified version for now. What is it used for? Well, this is not Always the high-tech law enforcement technology the police actually has even more fancy systems that depend on multiple cars that have different areas So different light frequency spectrums that they use This is a good solution that is very common for Private organizations or companies big buildings where you live in where you share where you have your parking place directly in the building And it's also used for parking solutions for the city So if you want to park your car in Rotterdam, you find the parking place Then you get to one of those poles and then you enter your number plate in there And then somebody will check the number plate like if you have parked They will validate that against the database there will be some picture on the It's used for speed control The Austrians have that anyone from Austria here and in the Netherlands. It's very common I think Switzerland has one of them and in Germany. They're planning on one of them and There are general ones for law enforcement when you enter or leave the city in Rotterdam It's very nicely one of those systems is directly when you leave the city with this never in direction of Amsterdam There's a system that reads the number plates and like 500 meter later There's a small sites ramp onto the Snelwach onto the highway where you very often have police standing. So I I'll show you later in the video. I made a video and I found a developer by that and that's also one of the solutions They say so they possibly come after you They really want to have to your discussion and that can be so easy reasons like did you pay your parking tickets? You pay a packet your taxes or More severe reasons like is there actually the probability? That if you have a warrant on your case and your car drives around the police might want to have a look who's in the car and it's also used since a short time for enforcing environmental zones So the in Germany, there's the omelts owner in the Netherlands, there's the milieu it's owner and And they also enforce this over those systems So to give you an idea how that looks This is a very common company slash private park System there's a call in the ground. There's a camera there under the camera There is a flashlight that works in the in front area You drive there with your car the call gets triggered. They take a picture Yeah This is the other Option of parking enforcement by the city. I told you you enter your number plate into a pole So it's done in a database. So the city is driving around with those cars. That is from the city of Rotterdam where I live and They basically take a picture of every car and every number plate and use this technology to after that have a database Where cars were parking at wet at what point and they just checked that against the database who's allowed to park there And if you see if you're standing in a parking area where you need to pay and this car run to the next pole I was told you have roughly seven minutes So if you pay seven minutes after because it also needs to follow the use case of somebody just got off the cars walking to the pole so If you ever see that run for the pole and buy a parking ticket If you have any questions, by the way, feel free to just ask. I'll also take German questions So speed control That's how it looks There's very nice signs announcing that the track control has a It's seen to be very precise. So your Margin of error you get what they did numbers is Not very large. It's like three kilometers power and Who of you is not living in Germany Okay, all of the others you you live in a happy place you have no idea how cheap speeding is in Germany One kilometer per hour to fast is roughly as expensive as Germany driving 36 kilometers per hour to fast Just to put this in a relation and yes, they sent use power speeding tickets for one kilometers per hour Which is interesting in a later case That's how it works technology wise. They're basically take two two times recognize your number plate write a time spare stem next to that and Yeah, the time took you to travel the distant time distant the defined distance Gives you a pretty precise speed Those blocks are usually in the area of five kilometers long. So you just have an Imagine I said they use it for enforcing the environmental zones That is how it looks when you drive over the bridge to Rotterdam at least was before the environmental zone got into Enforcement so you're driving past the sign where there's a number plate reader in there that looks in the database when your cars built and which environmental Emission laws it fulfills and then the sign tells you if you're allowed to go into the city in some weeks So you can still quickly buy a new car They put those up roughly I'd say some month before the environmental zone got into Enforcement, but yeah, that's the easiness how this data is available also in the Netherlands so that's a quick database look up in there in between for the Yeah, what your car can do and whatnot and how awful it smells and Yep, it directly tells you From 1st of January, you're still allowed in Why do I care? That's the building I live in And the garage is in the building And when I want to get my car into the building That's a symbolic picture. That's not the real entrance. That's basically what I'm driving into So when I then take my car and drive to work that's What I'm driving into so this is You know, I I just say very very common in the Netherlands most of IT companies I'd say more than 50% have such solutions so I I'm a German and I got a bit annoyed about that Because you know the first question is how long do you store that and The answer is What do you mean? How long do we store that? So when do you delete it? What do you mean delete? so Yeah The building didn't basically didn't really care where I live in my company in the beginning also didn't really care nobody really cared the vendor said it's a very secure solution and They're certified actually by to suit for their solution So I'm a consultant for a living so there is those days where you don't have an assignment and you sit around in the office right, I Try to talk to the vendor try to understand how it works and they basically answered me this is like Shortened from one page of piece of paper. They basically said this is very secure experts tried to believe us and I had kind of issues of actually Finding that out that works. So Let's see in what you what you can actually can do. So that's how it works There is a magnetic coil in the ground that makes a camera take a picture. The camera is an infrared picture It's using an infrared flashlight So the picture is a flashlight picture that gets underexposed. So you only have the police are the the Real thing there. This is then sent to an OCR library who tries to make text out of that and There is some back-end system behind that that process is that So to trigger a magnetic coil you as everybody knows who ever had to get out of a parking garage You need a fire extinguisher Which you can hold over the magnetic coil I'll show you something about that later and then you get a picture That's how those kind of pictures then look as you can see the picture is taken with a flashlight There is some areas who are retro reflective. That's how it's called and The pictures underexposed that you can see the areas in the retro reflective area pretty nicely and everything else just graze out This was just a symbolic pic that I couldn't walk past That's how it will roughly look For the picture that you throw in your CR library That's not very challenging. It's clear to see where the text area is and The amount of text is limited that you have to look in there. So I'll see I extracts number plate from the picture. I Don't have a good picture for that because it really isn't very nice to take pictures of git repositories of OCR libraries, but that's Basically what they use there and after that Something something database or something something back end usually something something database So number plate you can see that on the picture a bit Maybe if you look in the middle that this is reflective I tried to take the pictures somewhat from the distance from the area where the light was coming from The upper one is masking tape That was my first try where I thought really too complicated The lower one is sharpie, but this is already a High-quality version of the sharpie and later tries we I got a bit more Well, relax and that but I just wiped the sharpie off and tried again so yeah If you look a bit from the side the upper one you can see that there really is some kind of black structure from the masking tape I sadly have to say that I forgot the original at home, so I can't even show it to you. No the foil in the background is Just ordinary warning foils that are used When you kind of paint trucks or puts like warning things and trucks Turns out there is a recommendation for freight tracks that you kind of should outline your truck with retro reflective foil basically one time around and they give a recommendation for the width of that and There is a lower limit and the upper limit and the upper limit is exactly the height of a number plate so Yeah, well Yeah, that was what I had to do there and I promised you so It's a mobile phone video But you see what I'm doing there basically I'm holding a cardboard in my hand what I just showed that has the number plate and The fire extinguisher in the hand is the car The cross is pretty much the coil is in Exactly in the middle of the cross as I found out by trying around with that So that was pretty easy to remember So you hold it there trigger the car and the gate opens yep, and There's both of the tries with the sharpie and the masking tape, but yeah, that's Roughly as complicated as it was. Oh No, we are somewhere so I posted that on Twitter and basically really thought that was pretty much stating the obvious but I Found out it wasn't so obvious to everybody. So that's also why people kind of were like you should never talk about that So I'm now having this and there's a video camera over there, and I don't need to do this again. Hopefully but yeah What else can you do? This is a famous picture from the internet, but if you want to do this in your garage, that's not a good approach Because you should try something like or one equals one because otherwise it's really hard to verify because the only feedback from the system that you get is Does the door open or not? Which is already some interesting information like I have a colleague which I explained this to Who tried to write me a database? queries that try to bitwise most the content of the database by opening the door or not out of the System that actually would work, but we didn't get an SQL injection working, which is a bit sad But yeah multiple number plates multiple number plates throws up the system If you have two number plates the door doesn't open Which is too sad if you have to deal with a parking garage, but You have truck drivers all of their number plates in Their front screen are always wondered So if you throw our software with multiple number plates against it Especially if it doesn't say a number plate just some random text string who really isn't a number plate Then the software doesn't work anymore and The color of the number plate on else doesn't make yet. You don't need that Because it's infrared pictures. It's like it doesn't see color in the number plate so This works above the point that you have a retro reflective foil there, right? So if you have white retro reflective foil and Put your stickers with no right white retro reflective non foil on there That works Problem for me with that. It's rather complicated to take a picture of that. So and I yeah But yeah, this is a nice approach You can make this more complicated which I haven't tried but I would kind of challenge people to Because the foil that you have for this retro reflective is available in like 29 different colors and the exact precise Same 29 different colors are also available in non retro reflective foil. So any one of you has a cutting plotter that Might be an interesting approach. I'm pretty sure you can this way Get things That the computer can see but the human walking die on the broad past on the broad daylight can't see It's just white on white or colorful in colorful, but the sensor looks in a different frequency spectrum than the eye and So you can have selective information one just goes to you get my point, right? so This is the end of this talk. You have some questions. I want to give some shout outs one of them is to your fix Who isn't precisely well to get better and the other one is to my hacker space in Rotterdam, which is called the pixel bar There's a Twitter account for that. That's called pixel bar 010, which is the form code for Rotterdam If you want to follow that and yeah questions Because no one of you has questions. You have a question. Did you try using a really strong infrared light? That shines upwards to confuse the camera Yeah, already the normal if you Go up there in the wrong way to the reader and your cat your normal car light already shines in the camera Then it's already over You don't even need a specialized infrared equipment. This is your normal car light already works And that can be if you drive on there in a special angle you I'm sometimes get in the situation that you're blinding the camera So that's the sensors are not Super high quality There's not a lot of snow in Rotterdam. And so I don't know what that happens then Yeah, the vendor tells you the sensor should better not stand where it rains. I Don't know if that has to do with picture quality or then a tree of its waterproof Any more questions? Oh, that depends on the system and in the Netherlands in general the answer is yes, they store the data Our house has discovered. I think four weeks ago that there is new legislation That's called GDPR, which I kind of pointed them to so at the moment Just finding out that's storing number plates, which is private data according to the European Court is not so easy anymore But yeah, I wonder how it works when you when you drive in something with a draw the Consent to store and process the data and then try to drive out or so, but yeah, there will be Privacy is not a thing for them as I said in my house Per default the system just stores forever The system that we have in our house and also stores the successful attempts, which doesn't need to actually if you think about this when using the Double number plates in the pictures could you in theory if used in Germany use regular Expressions or is the problem just a double plate You mean when I have multiple plates and the OCR software throws way more Content back to the next processing step than this processing step expected that very much depends on the implementation There is one implementation, which is an older system, which we're not having anymore at my work Sadly that changed this already before I started looking in there because the old software was built on a I think Windows 2003 server and required My sql for Windows 3 something and that's just smelled very broken, but sadly they replaced that before I Was allowed to play with that Okay Could you or could we use this to? Mike a shadow Model railroad train identification system out of this Maybe Is there another question? So while talking about it are very often found one question. So I actually prepared this answer to keep it That's what you want to look for if you want to Google for it. It took me like a day to find out this name So I'm saving you the time that stuff's super cheap. It's actually sold in square meters So when you buy that from the company the they sell you one point 22 meters wide and the shortest the machine can cut is one meter and They didn't have a price for only one meter. So when I asked the company they actually send it to me as a sample And I only had to pay the shipment. So I just would recommend every hacker space to have like two Square meters to just and have your hacker space to play around with it whenever you have the feeling that you should Okay Okay, thank you. Thank you very much a round of applause, please