Skip to main content

UK cities trial pollution-measuring lasers

A new system that combines laser-based remote sensing and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) is being trialled in London and Birmingham in a bid to catch polluting cars. Developed by Hager Environmental and Atmospheric Technologies (HEAT), the emissions detecting and reporting system (EDAR) remotely detects and measures infrared absorption of environmentally critical gases coming out of a moving vehicle. The technology is combined with still/scene camera technology and an ANPR camera, which al
February 16, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
A new system that combines laser-based remote sensing and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) is being trialled in London and Birmingham in a bid to catch polluting cars.

Developed by Hager Environmental and Atmospheric Technologies (HEAT), the emissions detecting and reporting system (EDAR) remotely detects and measures infrared absorption of environmentally critical gases coming out of a moving vehicle.

The technology is combined with still/scene camera technology and an ANPR camera, which allows for the capture of not only a 2D image of the vehicle for vehicle profiling as it passes below the EDAR unit, but also a 3D multi spectral image of the entire exhaust plume and the identification of the subject vehicle.  

The company claims that EDAR’s valid read accuracy rate on a multi-lane state highway during heavy rush hour traffic is over 86 per cent and increases to 95 per cent on single-lane highway applications.  ‘Invalid reads’ are said to be typically due to situational exhaust plume interference or inadequate vehicle specific power.

Related Content

  • Lufft’s MARWIS moves weather
    September 22, 2014
    A mobile road weather sensor is providing authorities with new options for monitoring road conditions and winter maintenance operations. Road and traffic engineers know the vulnerable points in their network – cold spots where ice forms first, high-banked roads where snow accumulates, fog pockets… Traditionally, most authorities will position weather stations at these points to detect and monitor road conditions during bad weather events.
  • Green requirements of traffic video systems
    February 2, 2012
    Traficon's Head of Product and Application Management Robin Collaert offers up a discussion of the likely future green requirements of traffic video systems. At the most basic levels, ITS has the potential to significantly reduce the amounts of time which vehicles spend waiting at intersections, and less time spent waiting means less in the way of vehicular emissions. All of that will hardly come as news to most laypeople, let alone transport professionals. However, the reality is that even today too many r
  • Vitronic tech transforms tolling
    March 30, 2022
    Digital technologies are rapidly transforming the traffic technology industry. Innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to improve everything from pricing models and traffic management to safety and emission reduction.
  • Stereoscopic camera system enables speed monitoring across two lanes
    March 10, 2014
    Imagsa Technologies, a high-tech company founded in 2006 to develop high-speed intelligent cameras, will use Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014 to launch a major new camera, the Chronos’Spot. The company is a pioneer in the use of massive parallelism to analyse 270 images per second with 2048 x 1024pixeles resolution (2 megapixel). The Chronos’Spot stereoscopic vision system combines two of these smart cameras to capture and analyse a total of 1080 megapixels per second. This huge volume of data is processe