ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) can be used to store images captured by cameras as well as the text from the licence plate, with some configurable to store a photograph of the driver. Systems commonly use infrared lighting to allow the camera to take the picture at any time of day. A powerful flash is included in at least one version of the intersection-monitoring cameras, serving to illuminate the picture and make the offender aware of his or her mistake. ANPR technology tends to be region specific, owing to plate variation from place to place.

The software aspect of the systems runs on standard PC hardware and can be linked to another applications or databases. It first uses a series of image manipulation techniques to detect, normalise and enhance the image of the number plate, and finally optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the alphanumeric details of the licence plate. ANPR systems are generally deployed in one of the two basic approaches: one allows for the entire process to be performed at the lane location in real-time, the other transmits all the images from many lanes to a remote computer location and performs the OCR process at some later point in time. When done at the lane site, the information captured of the plate alphanumeric, date-time, lane identification and any other information that is required is completed in somewhere around 250 milliseconds. This information, now small data packets, can easily be transmitted to some remote computer for further processing if necessary, or stored at the lane for later retrieval.

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