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.
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.
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.
Never seen letters like that on license plates in Quebec.
Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:
Are they? Off the top of my head Germany is the only country I can think of that uses such a font (FE-Schrift).
German wiki mentiones 42 countries that also adapted the FE Schrift and 7 that use some adaptions:
I see. I'm in Europe and it's not very common there so that's why.
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.
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.
in my area I struggle to distinguish D, O, and 0. Idk if someone was paid to design that, but they did an awful job
You must remember that these are people who don't vary the size or colour of their money either.
They're not clever people.
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.
You're assuming that all people in the pipeline are competent
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.
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.
No. Its like drug dogs. Its just an excuse to do whatever they want. Infinite monkeys writing up probable cause forms.
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
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
Doing God's work!
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.
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.
this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities
The main point for AI
Yay! Great investment. Totally worth the buck.
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.
and how many false positives in the other 29%?
Get those criminals off the street.
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.
