Thanks for those ideas Mike. That NVE website looks pretty interesting too.The
app will be - **if** it goes ahead? - to photograph cars on a country road.
It's a big station abutting a nat park and they want to monitor who uses roads
at back of their property by photographing vehicle rego plates. It's semi arid
Outback country so I think dust will be the killer - how do you photo thru a
dust cloud thrown up as the vehicle moves away? If go for a forward shot, you'd
have probs with the vehicle's headlights at night. Plus flash/illumination
probs. Still thinkin' about that.

Don't want to use inductive loops or anything that needs cables spread out - it
needs to be smallish & easy to deploy so solid state sensors look attractive.
The range of the sensor would be an issue - it needs to detect a vehicle from
the side of the road. That's not far as we're talking dirt tracks & large 4x4
vehicles mostly. don't need auto rego-number reading. Hmmm ... a laser bounced
off a corner reflector is a possibility, maybe. Would you say solid state MR
sensors could detect a vehicle in a situation like that?
Debbie

--- Michael Rigby-Jones <Michael.Rigby-Jones@bookham.com> wrote:
> > I guess some more details on the application (if possible) would be
> helpfull.  With the explosive growth of speed cameras here in the UK,
> there are several different technologies in current use for vehicle
> speed and direction detection.
> 
> Inductive loops in ground
> Piezo cables in ground
> Radar
> Laser
> ANPR Automatic Number Plate Recognition (or License plate for non UK
> readers).
> 
> We now have a network of plate reading cameras on major roads throughout
> the UK ("TrafficMaster") that is currently used for traffic congestion
> monitoring, though it's potential for (mis)use for detcting speeding
> drivers or simply for surveilance is surely tempting the powers that be.
> However, it shows that the technology must now be relatively
> inexpensive.
> 

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