An Intelligent System for Vehicle Access Control using RFID and ALPR Technologies

This paper introduces a hybrid system for vehicle access control using RFID and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technologies. RFID technology is proven to provide an effective solution to different tracking and localization problems. However, the technology has its shortcomings in tracking objects/users without a tag. As such, we propose to complement this technology with ALPR to control the access of different types of vehicles to the area of Makkah (Saudi Arabia) during Pilgrimage seasons. This limited area can easily get congested with the huge number of vehicles attempting access. Before the start of the season, vehicles authorized to access the region are assigned passive RFID tags specifying their allowed schedule of entry. Violating vehicles that do not have RFID tags are detected and identified using ALPR. The developed system was tested over two pilgrimage seasons. The experiments showed that the developed RFID system was able to identify all passing vehicles with speeds up to 100 km/h, while the ALPR system achieved 94% recognition accuracy of vehicles not equipped with RFID tags.