The Fusion ANPR offers seamless operation when integrated with the Fusion III digital video recorder (DVR). No additional hardware or third party software is required and it is quick and easy to set up. The Fusion ANPR software can also be retro-fitted to existing Fusion III systems. The ability to network the software across multiple locations allows surveillance personnel to monitor the movement of suspicious vehicles or vehicles of interest between different sites.

"Previous number plate recognition systems have lacked the accuracy, flexibility, integration and interaction needed to make them truly effective," said Chris Koetsier, EMEA marketing leader, Honeywell Systems Group. "Fusion with ANPR brings all these elements together, creating an all-in-one solution for any ANPR environment. The net result is more effective surveillance operations, higher productivity and lower costs."

Designed to run on Honeywell's Fusion III v3.5 Digital Video Recorder, the Fusion ANPR software represents a significant advancement in functionality. Personnel using the software will benefit from features such as:

· Full alarm and alert functionality - providing audible and visual alerts with 'action messages' - and audit trail;
· Full database sorting based on time, data, partial plate, driver name;
· Real-time number plate monitoring;
· The ability to share data across multiple locations;
· The ability to read the number plates within 53 countries worldwide
· Automatic barrier, gate and access point control thanks to the Fusion ANPR Live feature.

At the heart of the Fusion ANPR lies the Engine. There are two primary components of the Engine: image capture and recognition software.

Key image capture features include: plate capture at angles of up to 30 percent in all directions of skew, tilt and rotation; multiple grabs that create near-perfect captures of the plate (other solutions take only a single plate grab, resulting in partial plate image and misreads); and a powerful, multi-technique plate finder that can locate number plate strings in difficult conditions.

Meanwhile, recognition software features include: Optical Character Recognition technology to better identify characters or likely characters on number plates; plate filtering techniques to eliminate small plates or plates crossing the edge of the image, and anomalies such as road markings being interpreted as plates; and tracing processing which reads the plate many times as it crosses the field of view, yielding a more accurate read.

In addition, the optional application software enables number plates to be compared against shared databases at additional sites; up to 15 Fusion ANPR DVRs can be networked together, with no loss in performance.