Vehicle Recognition: Why It's Time to Go Beyond the Plate

By: Laura Caillot

License Plate Recognition (LPR/ANPR) has been a game-changer for decades. It’s precise, reliable, and for many industries, essential. Whether for access control, enforcement, or parking management, LPR has been the trusted foundation for identifying vehicles. And it still is!

But as environments become more complex and the demand for reliability increases, industries are expanding the conversation. 

Not away from LPR, but beyond it.

LPR Still Leads, But It Doesn’t Stand Alone

Let’s be clear: the license plate is still the primary key to identifying a vehicle. It’s the one element that connects a car to a person, a record, or a transaction; without it, the legal and administrative link is lost.

That said, the physical world isn’t always kind to license plates; they might be dirty, damaged, blocked by bike racks, or even missing. Even the best LPR-based systems can’t overcome these limitations, which occur more frequently than expected and have a significant impact on the overall reliability of LPR.  

This is where additional layers of recognition become valuable. Now it's possible to go beyond the plate and analyze a vehicle’s make, model, color, shape, and even finer details, such as decals, dents, and modifications, not only on the license plate itself but on the entire vehicle. 

When systems combine LPR with these AI-powered visual cues, vehicle identification becomes far more resilient and reliable.

Using new recognition features to add context and confidence to LPR

AI enables systems to learn, detect, and distinguish visual patterns, making it possible to recognize vehicles from multiple angles, in varying lighting conditions, and with a level of precision previously impossible. Survision systems can now also detect even minor dents on the plate, along with other vehicle details, to help identify vehicles with higher accuracy than ever.

But here’s the key: despite their great potential, plate numbers, make, model, color, and visual features are all just raw data that don't hold value on their own; they still need a high grade of business intelligence and expertise to be properly procesed, matched and contextualized, so a reliable full vehicle identity is possible.

That’s what vehicle identification is really about. Not just "reading what’s in front of the camera", but understanding it in a way that supports smarter decisions and more reliable outcomes. 

This is not about just adding “a couple more line items to a database”, but a huge leap forward on the system's ability to understand and predict the physical world, something that you can use to streamline your whole vehicle identification operation significantly.

Read Rate and Matching Rate, Seeing the Bigger Picture

LPR systems are often evaluated based on “Read Rate Per Lane” KPI, which measures the frequency at which they successfully capture a license plate at a single point.

But in real-world operations, another KPI often matters just as much, if not more: the Matching Rate, or “how reliably the system can confirm that a vehicle exiting a facility is the same one that entered”, so If a plate read isn’t perfect at one checkpoint, a full vehicle recognition system may still be able to match the vehicle using other attributes like shape, color, or visual markings. 

With these added layers of recognition, Survision solutions can now enhance tracking performance, reduce errors, and provide a complete picture of vehicle movement, resulting in smoother operations, fewer exceptions, and increased confidence in the captured data. 

The Road Forward, LPR at the Core with Recognition All Around

At Survision, we recognize that we operate in the vehicle control industry, and our primary goal has always been to deliver value to companies and their customers. As a result, we are expanding our capabilities from License Plate Recognition to Vehicle Recognition.

We’re not moving away from license plate recognition; we're building on it. 

LPR remains at the heart, but now it’s supported by AI-driven vehicle recognition capabilities, which make a more powerful and accurate system that performs better in everyday conditions, even when the plate isn’t easy to read.

These new features are now available for new and existing fixed and mobile solutions. Schedule a meeting or email us at contact@survisiongroup.com for more information.