Executive Summary

Pakistan as a developing country is striving hard to catch up with the pace of developing countries of the region. However Pakistan is facing a lot of problems like increase in population, decrease in economic growth and terrorism etc. With these problems in the way, the pace is not up to the mark. One of the major problems Pakistan is facing is the increase in population growth and decline in death rate, which results in very slow, or no increase in the living standards of the people. The approximate increase in population growth of Pakistan is 2.77% per annum, which is very high for a developing country. The continuing expansion of the cities like Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad makes the problems worse for controlling authorities of the cities.

With the increase in population, the vehicles on the roads are also increasing immensely which is creating huge problems for traffic controlling agencies not only in controlling the traffic but also in keeping track of vehicles on the roads. Similarly this increase in population and hence increase in vehicles on road is also increasing the security threats as Pakistan is already fighting terrorism as one of the major villains. Stolen cars are mostly used for terrorism and other illegal activities. In normal days, these stolen cars will get un-noticed because of no intelligent way of detecting them. Even if the registration number of the stolen vehicle is given to all the sergeants of the city, it is very difficult for the sergeants to identify the stolen car because of extreme traffic congestions on the road. The vehicle hence passes the security checks and can be used to perform illegal action.

Similarly in sensitive areas like Government offices, Supreme court, Police head offices and Army offices etc. where only authorized vehicles are permitted to enter, manual checking of vehicle is done, so that no unauthorized vehicles enters the area. The security officer standing on the entry gate checks for the authorized vehicle sticker or in most cases registration number of the vehicle to see if the vehicle is authorized to enter the area or not. This whole process takes a lot of time, energy and manpower and still has the risk of human error.

Motorway and Ring road have been really successful in Lahore. Both the motorway and the ring road are very convenient and fast way of travelling. However tolling on these roads especially on ring road is still not fully automated.

In big cities where there is a lot of traffic, keeping track of vehicles on road is a very difficult task. In countries like Pakistan, there is actually no record of vehicles on the road.

This project proposes a system called, “Vehicle recognition system using low cost short range wireless technologies (IEEE 802.15.4)”, which is expected to develop a system which can set the foundation for systems that can solve above mentioned problems in an efficient way. The system will use cameras on the roads, which will capture the image of the vehicle on the road and detects the vehicle type (Car, Bus, Truck, Motorbike, Rickshaw etc.) and also captures the image of the registration number of the vehicle. This information will be then processed using controller device attached with the camera and is sent to the control centre using short range wireless technology, ZigBee, using multi-hops communication. After receiving the information at the control centre, proper action can be taken.