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Stolen Vehicle Identification and Number plate detection





What are we trying to do?

  • With vehicle thefts increasing to alarming levels, our platform allows in the identification of regions with high thefts and provides a medium to detect stolen vehicles using number plate scanning. The platform can be used to detect stolen vehicles in real-time and the project can be scaled to use live video stream instead of images.
  • We scraped and worked on the vehicle theft data available for Delhi region as a part of this four-month project marathon. The project has been developed in a way that it can be later scaled to a larger domain.

The Data
  • The dataset was obtained from the Delhi police website (https://zipnet.delhipolice.gov.in/). The data was scraped from the Delhi region using Beautiful Soup. We scraped the data for a span of 8 months, but the method can be scaled to updates FIRs on a daily basis.
  • Each FIR is manually curated by a police officer, so the data has a lot of noise and requires to be cleaned before any analysis or work can be done. For Eg: The place of theft is very arbitrary written and cannot be used for any purpose by itself.

Talking places
  • For the analysis part, we wanted locations, a map representation to be precise.
  • This would prove helpful to take in the pinpoints of theft incidents.
  • Hence, the required annotation of coordinates corresponding to the address fields.
  • We used the Google API in order to map the theft locations to the corresponding theft locations.

Analysis
  • Location-based analysis: We used google’s geocode API to get coordinates of places from where vehicles were stolen and then we generated heat-map from those coordinates. Our analysis showed that -
    • Most Dark hotspots were parking of Metro Stations, Hospitals, Malls, etc.
    • Old Delhi area had more dark hotspots than New Delhi.
    • Army Cant Area in Delhi had least hotspots 

      map.png
  • Day/Weekly Analysis of thefts - The day wise analysis shows the day wise frequency of the motor vehicle thefts. In our analysis, we found that -
    • On the weekend there are fewer thefts compared to weekdays (One possible reason we could think of was because of holiday metro parking remain empty as compared to weekdays, that’s why less theft reports.)
  • Date wise Analysis: We analyzed date wise frequency  of FIRs. After analysis we got some unexpected results. We were expecting -
    • At the starting of the month, thefts would be more.
    • At the end of the month, thefts would be more.
    • But we didn't find both the above mentioned, surprisingly we found that theft frequency was almost equally distributed throughout the month.
  • Festival Analysis: We observed that during the Festival Season frequency of thefts increased suddenly. We saw that during:
    • Navratri theft increased by 25% than Normal days.
    • Diwali theft increased by 8% than Normal days.
    • New Year theft increased by 25% than Normal days
.
  • Validation of Results:
    • To validate the results that we got from the heatmap, we generated a word map from all the addresses written in FIR. We got similar results for both word map and heatmap.
  • Our analysis showed 115-125 FIRs of vehicle thefts per day in Delhi, to validate this we found this article which shows similar results that we got in our analysis.
Open ALPR:
LPR sometimes called ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition) has 3 major stages.
  1. License Plate Detection: This is the first and probably the most important stage of the system. It is at this stage that the position of the license plate is determined. The input at this stage is an image of the vehicle and the output is the license plate.
  2. Character Segmentation: It’s at this stage the characters on the license plate are mapped out and segmented into individual images.
  3. Character Recognition: This is where we wrap things up. The characters earlier segmented are identified here. We’ll be using machine learning for this.



Output:
  • JSON object (color, number plate, model, registration number)
  • Already been tested on a large dataset of Indian cars, quite accurate predictions.

Combining both :
  1. Took image
  2. Extracted data
  3. Looked up in the database

Future work
  • Implement with a video-based extraction of number plates
  • Live database scraping (daily updates)
  • Scaling to more cities/regions with online for data available for thefts

Where can we get the images from?
  • Toll plazas are excellent examples. (stable video feed)
  • CCTV cameras

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