Office of Public Affairs THE HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCJENCE G TECHNOLOGY
Clear Water Bay Kowloon
Hong Kong Tel No : (852) 358 6316 Fax No: (852) 358 0537
For immediate release 18 May 1993
HKUST Computer Project Receives Award from DEC
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A new research project at the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology has been selected for inclusion in Digital Equipment
Corporation’s worldwide Alpha Innovator Program. DEC has granted a powerful Alpha AXP computerto HKUST to facilitate the project’s work on ‘Automatic Vehicle License Plate Number Recognition’.
“I am delighted that our project has been selected,” said Dr. Chung Mong LEE, lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at HKUST, who leads a team of postgraduate students in this effort to develop a robust system for recognizing vehicle license plate numbers in adverse environments.
The original stimulus for this research was the development of a system for recognizing container ID numbers in the port of Singapore, where Dr. Lee was one of the principal investigators in this project. Installed at several gates, this system shortened the processing time for making certain that the right truck was towing the right container in and out of the container yards.
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“What we want to do now is extend the experience gained from developing this system to a more complicated environment,” said Dr. Lee. “We have in mind a system that is flexible enough to read the license plate number of a moving vehicle .”
A technology for recognizing characters on objects moving at high speed or unknown speed can be applied to many practical situations, such as reading vehicle numbers involved in traffic violations and speeding up tunnel toll collection with an auto-toll system. Similar technology can also be applied to read train numbers for surveillance and control purposes and also to read container identification numbers while they are being manipulated during times of loading and unloading.
