This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
They're actually badly secured android devices.
If you have a million stolen licenses, but on the road remain very few, say 1k. While there are say 100m other cars. If you now have 99% accuracy, you will read 990 stolen cars, and misread 1m plates. Since 1% of plates are stolen, you randomly hit 10k of those misreads into a stolen plate.
This is generally alwayd an issue with rolling out mass tests. If the thing you search is even rarer than your failure rate, most detections are errors no matter how good your test.
This is why we don't just test everyone for diseases all the time even when it would be very cheap and simple.
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.
The C could be definitely be turned into the G pretty flawlessly.
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.
Not without some whiteout though, notice how the stroke gets thinner as it curves upwards?
In some cases in the US, cops enter both O and 0 into the search databases. This probably compounds the number of false positives.
Considering O and 0 are both pronounced "oh" in common parlance... Yeah, that tracks.
In the US, the states make their own license plate regulations and choices. So, it varies from state to state, like everything else in this hellhole.
It's basic statistics.
That’s the problem if you are fishing for a very small number of targets out of an absolutely bonkers large pool of potential targets - at some point your false positives start becoming more and more prevalent in relation to actual positives. That is simply statistics and if flock can’t improve the global accuracy by some exponents, this problem will grow - the more Flock gets used and the more licence plates they are scanning, the more the false positives increase.
And it is a massive problem, because the false positive marks you as a criminal - that means any legal recourse gets expensive and painful. This technology creates more problems for everyday people than the amount of issues it removes by tracking actual criminals.
Cutting them down with a reciprocating saw is absolutely justified. These things are an affront to privacy and accuse random citizens of being guilty of felonies.
I hope this results in their evidence being inadmissible to judges/juries.
If you're ever on a jury remember this
since its a mass surveillance apparatus, the juror/court was not its intended purpose. they likely profile(errenously) potential people who are going to be a "nuisance" in the future.
True but its nominal and financial justification would be eliminated
If it's the responsibility of the party that's been misidenified to correct the mistake, this was intentional. Putting fines to random people, knowing a proportion won't fight it, is a foundationional pillar of Authoritarianism. What's worse is even more work will now need to be done to undo and correc this, because it's already in place. The lawmakers will try to get the percentage up, instead of removing the system.
On one hand that's a good thing.
But on the other its not, as it can cause someone else with a similar plate number to be accused of a crime or infraction, etc that another committed.
Yup, just read an article about that the other day. They even acknowledged it was going to keep happening to the person whose vehicle was mistakenly flagged because of a partial ID match, and just advised him to keep the car at home until they figured out how to fix it. In his case it wasn't as big a deal since it was a rental, but can you imagine being told to not drive your own fucking car or the cops will be automatically called to come pull you over as a carjacker??
Wow, that is absolutely insane. I hate this current timeline so much.
not only that they track the actual drivers/passenger faces too now.
Dozens of times so far. And the perpetrators point at each other, or simply refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing.
No. Its like drug dogs. Its just an excuse to do whatever they want. Infinite monkeys writing up probable cause forms.
good thing for leo to profile people "errenously", everyone knows its for people who are going to potentially protest in the future. and abused by DV-prone cops to stalk thier SO.
I live in a relatively small mountain town near that City and the wonderful citizens of my town have taken a liking to absolutely fucking destroying those things to the point where we're having a city hall thing on the 10th so that everybody can air their complaints.
don't forget to clap
huh. i wonder if they don't have them around my town because the test one they put on the bike route i take to the next town acquired so many holes without my help i felt i didn't need to add.
Doing God's work!
That's the problem if you are fishing for a very small number of targets out of an absolutely bonkers large pool of potential targets - at some point your false positives start becoming more and more prevalent than actual positives. That is simply statistics and if flock can't improve the global accuracy by some exponents, this problem will grow.
If they flag all the plates, they're bound to get all the ones they're aiming for. It's a simple solution.
For a Trump admin approved device, we're all shocked it read that well
Yay! Great investment. Totally worth the buck.
this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities
The main point for AI
I'm pretty sure I could do better stoned. I mean, I'm typing with a much higher accuracy than 71%, and I'm stoned right now.
For context: I once lived in roseville and worked in Sacramento. They shared radio and otaTV stations back when those were a thing. I have heard about (insane) people commuting to sf from there.
This isn't bumfuck nowhere.
Side note: There's still over the air television, it's just digital instead of analog.
