Yahoo Autos This New Camera Can Tell If You're Trying to Cheat the Carpool Lane
Remember the dude who got caught in the carpool lane with a cardboard cutout of the most interesting man in the world? He was trying to cheat the system by using the Dos Equis guy as a "passenger" to gain entry to the HOV lane. He's far from the only person to cheat the carpool lane, so the same company that makes your copier has developed an advanced solution.
Xerox has a thing it likes to call Vehicle Passenger Detection that takes pictures of your car and determines if your passenger is an actual person, or a clever fake. Per a Wired report, Xerox claims it can even tell the difference between a dog and a baby in a car seat. Vehicle Passenger Detection debuted back in 2014, but new data proves its high accuracy level.
As Wired reports, the Vehicle Passenger Detection system uses two cameras, a laser image trigger, an illuminator and a video image processor to capture images of a car's front- and rear-seat passengers. It works up to 100 mph and also captures the vehicle's license plate. It uses a computer algorithm to process the images and determine how many legitimate passengers you have in your car.
Last year, the company ran a trial in California where it caught 95 percent of cheaters, while human observers only caught 36 percent.
Xerox says the system costs as much to install as an electric toll system, but depends on the size significantly. As an example, the state of Massachusetts will spend $130 million on electric toll systems across the 138-mile Massachusetts Turnpike.
If we ever see this system in large-scale use, it might not be for a long time, but it'll certainly deter HOV-lane cheaters. In the meantime, you'll just need to be a bit more clever than the dude pictured above.
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