Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
QR codes and speed cameras
Circlotron:
I wonder just how easy it would have been for someone that wrote the software for a roadside “safety” ::) camera to include the ability to make it able to recognise a QR code on the back of a vehicle and consequently ignore that vehicle, or maybe allow it more margin than usual? Feeling cynical today.
ataradov:
No matter how bad the code culture is in the company, it would be very hard to include something like this if cameras already don't have code for QR recognition. If for whatever legitimate reason there is code like this, it would be possible to slip some additional test.
But the problem is that camera resolution is not that high to adequately capture small QR code.
And many such systems are just plain cameras, and all the calculations are done on the backend. Not sure if this makes easier or harder.
In Russia (and I guess in Europe too) there is a very popular style of such system where plain video cameras are placed at known intervals along the highways. And the speed measurement is done based on how long it takes for the vehicle to travel between two consecutive cameras. It would be hard to spoof thing like that, since all frames are time stamped.
janoc:
Pretty hard. Reading a license plate is already difficult and those use large symbols. Unless you wanted to plaster the car with a code the size of the door, it will be very hard to read that from a distance and on a moving car.
QR codes are robust but they are also fairly "dense" and not meant to be read from a large distance (they were designed as a replacement for a regular barcode). If you wanted to implement something like you are implying, it would be vastly simpler to enter my license plate into the database to make the system ignore it instead of adding an extra code scan.
And if you are talking about speed cameras, those actually don't do things in real time, the radar only triggers the camera to take a picture if it detects a vehicle going faster than a certain limit. So it would photograph your car regardless of any codes - the device is pretty "stupid" in this regard - the camera doesn't do anything else but take pictures for evidence purposes once the speeding has been detected.
At least here in France the data from these cameras are then downloaded periodically (the older ones require a guy to physically visit the installation and to retrieve the data, the newer ones send the data over GSM automatically) and then the photos are reviewed by actual people who generate the tickets, as appropriate. It isn't fully automated (and can't be, because the radars often generate unusable pictures for various reasons and such tickets would get overturned by the courts), so any "code" wouldn't help you there.
cdev:
They also use the MAC addresses of your digital devices. (To figure out how fast traffic is moving)
ataradov:
I think both iOS and Android spoof MACs while scanning.
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