Tattile’s automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras are in use for a traffic monitoring application in order to keep track of vehicles passing across Mobile Bay, Alabama.
Mobile Bay is a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico in the state of Alabama, United States. The head of the bay is crossed by two major thoroughfares: Interstate 10, known as the Jubilee Parkway, and US 90/US 98, known as the Battleship Parkway. These two bridges serve as the primary connections between the city of Mobile and the Eastern Shore. The collected traffic monitoring data refers to the vehicles traveling on Interstate 10, in both directions.
Mobile Bay area traffic situation: why is it important to gather data?
Data gathering is part of the plan to build a new bridge and bayway. Tattile’s automatic license plate recognition cameras are essential to this project for several reasons, impacting the design of the new bridge.
Understanding how vehicles move through a region — when, where and how frequently — enables authorities to make data-driven decisions that improve safety, reduce congestion and enhance overall efficiency. In the Mobile Bay area, monitoring traffic is especially fundamental for understanding traffic patterns, peak travel times and commuter behavior. This information supports decision-making for infrastructure investments, such as the new bridge mentioned above.
Reliable, large-scale traffic data allows for evidence-based policy decisions: this kind of data provides a factual basis for effective transportation policy.
Tattile’s ALPR cameras: Tolling+ and Axle Counter
Because they are near the sea, these automatic license plate recognition cameras must be resilient to all atmospheric conditions and, most importantly, to humidity and seawater. Another key performance indicator to keep in mind is that Interstate 10 is one of the most heavily trafficked roads in the area, with more than 100,000 transits every single day!
To satisfy the high performance required, Tollscopic chose Tattile’s Tolling+ and Axle Counter to operate in this automatic license plate recognition system.
The first camera can detect and evaluate transits using OCR and context channels. This improves the visibility of objects under different working conditions because it operates simultaneously in both the infrared and visible fields. By reading the license plate in both the OCR and context channels at the same time, Tolling+ can deliver superior performance, even when the license plates are dirty, damaged, or overexposed. It guarantees exceptional detection accuracy, covering up to 2 lanes with one camera with the 8 Mpx version.
The latter offers the capability to detect and count the number of vehicles’ axles in a free-flow application. Thanks to its installation layout, the Axle Counter is modular and replicable on multiple lanes. With a high performance accuracy, Tattile’s Axle Counter can reliably detect:
- standard axles;
- twin (or “tandem”) axles, which are often found on heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) and trailers;
- lifted or raised axles, which may not always be in contact with the road but can still be accounted for.
It is designed to operate in heavily trafficked environments, such as Interstate 10, where a wide variety of vehicle types are present. These include passenger cars, light commercial vehicles, heavy-duty trucks or buses, and long-haul transport vehicles. The system must be robust enough to distinguish the axles even in dynamic and complex traffic scenarios. Their precision and reliability are critical for managing high-traffic roads, especially where vehicle classification and monitoring are fundamental.
The camera captures images at a high frame rate and processes them using internal deep learning algorithms (A.I.), which are trained over a large number of pictures to provide high performance in a compact processing device. Similar to Tolling+, the Axle Counter captures clear and detailed images in any weather conditions and during the night without interfering with vehicle drivers, complying entirely with the KPIs.
