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Infrared Scans May Regulate HOT Lanes
The scanning device shines an invisible infrared light on people in vehicles to zero in on human skin.
(Courtesy Of Vehicle Occupancy L - Courtesy Of Vehicle Occupancy L)
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In Minneapolis, state authorities say they have sharply cut cheating rates by outfitting police cruisers with receivers that can tell whether a passing car has paid. Officers hear a sound when the system determines that a driver hasn't paid and an officer can see whether it's someone riding alone.
In Virginia, similar receivers could scour the recent transactions of passing motorists for odd patterns, such as someone who drives miles in carpool mode and then suddenly flips the switch to become a paying customer after seeing an officer, said Transurban's Daley.
Some legal issues are being hashed out. In Denver, a carpool driver was fined last year for driving past an electronic toll sensor without a transponder. He challenged the fine and won.
The infrared head-counting device being considered in Virginia, originally dubbed Cyclops and now called dtect, is being developed by an optics researcher at Loughborough University in England and a British start-up company.
Work started five years ago when operators of a carpool lane in Leeds sought help, said Tim Ballantyne, an executive with Vehicle Occupancy Ltd. Designers had to find a way to deal with different windshields, ethnicities, occupant heights, light, weather and even facial hair. Their basic insight: Human skin reacts like nothing else when hit with two frequencies of infrared light.
"All blood is red, and all living humans have water in them, and we're reliant on those attributes," he said.
To address privacy concerns, before the image is made available for enforcement, the software obscures people's faces with a green dot. The company encrypted some software to make it difficult for users to unlock the originals. Daley said his goal is a system that would connect a license plate to the number of passengers in the car without ever releasing an image of the occupants.
"The images we're capturing are not ideal for identifying the occupant anyway. It looks gray, and the facial features aren't particularly well defined," Ballantyne said.
