Instant traveling companion discovery based on large scale streaming ANPR data

Traveling companions are object groups that move together in a period of time. To quickly identify traveling companions from a special kind of streaming traffic data, called automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) data, a framework and several algorithms were presented to discover companion vehicles, which can instantly detect suspicious companion vehicles with their probabilities when they pass through monitoring cameras.The framework can be used in many time-sensitive scenarios like taking surveillance on suspect trackers for specific vehicles. Experiments show that the proposed approach can process streaming ANPR data directly and discover companion vehicles in nearly real time.