Submission Category: Operations
In May 2006, 407 ETR implemented Vehicle Fingerprinting, state-of-the-art technology in vehicle recognition, also referred to as Vehicle Data Tag (VDT). The implementation of this leading edge application has had a significant impact. It has dramatically reduced the number of plates requiring manual verification and the number of staff performing this function. 407 ETR’s customers make over 375,000 trips each workday and are sent over 1.3 million toll bills each month. With 20% of these trips being captured by video, a significant amount of revenue relies on being able to accurately identify these vehicles. Experience has shown that plate character information alone is not sufficient for processing some video transactions. VDT technology enhances overall vehicle recognition accuracy by providing the ability to identify vehicles using more than the plate. Available VDT software was integrated with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software already used by 407 ETR. Considerable customization was required to build the interface between these two applications and to integrate with 407 ETR business rules. VDT technology was piloted in the second half of 2006 to allow for fine-tuning, quality assurance and learning and then was officially launched in the first quarter of 2007.