There had been a fairly decent open APLR library called OpenALPR. It used to be updated fairly regularly, but then was "acquired" and now sits abandoned for almost a decade without any updates, while the company that acquired it (REKOR) has commercialized it and extended it as a closed source API and platform.
ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic).
The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while).
All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.
ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic).
The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while).
All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.