Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR): A State-of-the-Art Review

Our Take

Credit to Wael Badawy for going under the hood of automatic license plate recognition rather than just marketing it. Videos like this matter because most people encounter ALPR only as a black box mounted on a pole — they never see the image processing pipeline, the OCR models, or the error rates that determine whether a camera flags your car by mistake. When you understand that ALPR is fundamentally pattern-matching software with known failure modes, it gets a lot harder to accept vendor claims that these systems are infallible or that misreads are rare edge cases.

That technical framing is exactly why we push back on the deployment of this tech at scale by companies like Flock Safety. A 'state-of-the-art review' from an engineering perspective is agnostic about who owns the data, how long it's retained, or whether local police departments are quietly building regional surveillance networks with almost no public oversight. The math may be neutral; the rollout across thousands of neighborhoods absolutely is not.

If this video has you thinking about where these cameras actually are in your area, check out our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on ALPR expansion in your own city.