Patent ID: 6140941
Filing Date: 2000-10-31
Classification: G07B,G08G

Abstract:
A method of determining tolls for use of a toll road for vehicles containing transponders and for vehicles that do not contain transponders, said method comprising the steps of:detecting vehicles on the toll road and generating area data indicative of the particular position of a vehicle on the roadway and detection time of each vehicle at such position;processing transponder ID codes for a transponder-equipped vehicle;detecting the location of transponders associated with vehicles on the toll road and generating location data indicative of the location of the transponders;determining whether a vehicle is a transponder-equipped vehicle by examining whether a correlation exists between the area data and the location data;generating transaction reports for the transponder-equipped vehicles comprising information about a vehicle's travel on the toll road;generating video images of license plates of vehicles that do not contain a transponder;processing the video images of the license plates to determine the license plate numbers of the vehicles that do not contain a transponder;generating transaction reports for the vehicles tat do not contain transponders comprising information about a vehicle's travel on the toll road; andprocessing the respective transaction reports associated with each vehicle to determine tolls for the use of the toll road, and when a vehicle does not contain a transponder, performing the steps of:isolating an image of the license plate of the vehicle derive from data obtained at the first individual location within one or more frames of video data using a pattern matching system;processing the isolated image of the license plate obtained at the first individual location using optical character recognition software to determine the actual plate number;isolating an image of the license plate of the vehicle derived from data obtained at the second different individual location within one or more flames of video data using the pattern matching system;processing the isolated image of the license plate obtained at the second different individual location using optical character recognition software to determine the actual plate number; andcomparing the two actual license plate numbers to confirm that they match;processing nonvideo data contained in the transaction reports to determine the tolls for use of the toll road.