That's probably exactly what they did, deployed a sbc + some off the shelf model and increased the price 300x by making a black plastic shell.

I guess that they are implementing crappy cameras? Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:

Note how each letter is unique and can't be transformed with a sharpie into another. That also makes OCR easy. If you use a crappy dashcam, you will get problems regardless. Esp. in low light situations at higher speeds.

So I would guess that Flock uses cheap sensors and cheap lenses. Which kind of makes sense when they are putting out thousands of scanners.

If you have a million stolen licenses, but on the road remain very few, say 1k. While there are say 100m other cars. If you now have 99% accuracy, you will read 990 stolen cars, and misread 1m plates. Since 1% of plates are stolen, you randomly hit 10k of those misreads into a stolen plate.

This is generally alwayd an issue with rolling out mass tests. If the thing you search is even rarer than your failure rate, most detections are errors no matter how good your test.

This is why we don't just test everyone for diseases all the time even when it would be very cheap and simple.

You're assuming that all people in the pipeline are competent

It's basic statistics.

• True Positives (TP) 415
• False Positives (FP) 1,012
• False Negatives (FN) (Calculated using 96% Recall) 17 Target plates that were missed.
• Precision TP / (TP + FP) 29.1% When it hits, it’s wrong most of the time.
• Recall (Assumed from Global Acc.) 96.0% It successfully catches almost all targets.

That’s the problem if you are fishing for a very small number of targets out of an absolutely bonkers large pool of potential targets - at some point your false positives start becoming more and more prevalent in relation to actual positives. That is simply statistics and if flock can’t improve the global accuracy by some exponents, this problem will grow - the more Flock gets used and the more licence plates they are scanning, the more the false positives increase.

And it is a massive problem, because the false positive marks you as a criminal - that means any legal recourse gets expensive and painful. This technology creates more problems for everyday people than the amount of issues it removes by tracking actual criminals.

Cutting them down with a reciprocating saw is absolutely justified. These things are an affront to privacy and accuse random citizens of being guilty of felonies.