METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR DATA COLLECTION USING PROCESSED IMAGE DATA

• US 20150125042A1
• Filed: 10/08/2014
• Published: 05/07/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 10/08/2013
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Smartlanes Technologies, LLC
• Original Assignee: Smartlanes Technologies, LLC
• Inventors: Haden, Stephen, Khalifa, Amine Ben, Hamilton, Jessica
• Application Number:
  US14/510,073
• Publication Number:
  US 20150125042A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/105
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/52 Surveillance or monitoring of activities, e.g. for recognising suspicious objects recognising microscopic objects G06V20/69
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/62 Text, e.g. of license plates, overlay texts or captions on TV images
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 2201/08 Detecting or categorising vehicles

Abstract

The present invention relates to a system and method for capturing data from vehicles and processing the captured vehicle data to generate a set of demographic data based on the set of captured demographic data. Specifically, the invention captures video or image data of one or more vehicles at a business location. Additional data may be gathered and transmitted with the image data. The captured data may then be compressed and sent to a remote server for further processing. The data is processed to identify a set of salient objects and to generate a set of demographic data from the identified set of objects. The demographic data is then associated one or more customer records.

Claims

1. A system for collecting demographic data, the system comprising:

a set of data collection devices adapted to capture a set of image data from a vehicle;

at least one server communicatively connected through a network to the set of data collection devices, the server comprising;

a database adapted to store data received from the set of data collection devices;

at least one processor adapted to process the set of image data to generate a set of salient objects identified from the set of image data, the at least one processor further adapted to generate a set of processed data from the identified set of salient objects, to generate a set of customer data based in part on the set of customer data, and to associate the set of customer data with a customer;

a collected data database adapted to store the set of customer data; and

an output module adapted to generate and transmit a set of output data comprising data from the set of customer data.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the set of data collection devices comprises a set of video cameras and a set of wireless network scanning devices.

3. The system of claim 1 wherein the set of processed data comprises customer preferences, vehicle information, residence information.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the at least one processor is further adapted to:

identify a vehicle license plate number; and

generate an encrypted license plate identifier.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein the at least one processor is further adapted to generate a confidence score.

6. The system of claim 1 wherein the at least one processor is further adapted to perform optical character recognition on the set of data.

7. The system of claim 1 wherein the at least one processor is further adapted to identify the set of salient objects as either image data or text data.

8. The system of claim 1 wherein the at least one processor is further adapted to:

identify images or video sequences in the set of data that contain vehicles;

generate a set of vehicle images; and

determine at least one region of interest in the set of vehicle images.

9. The system of claim 1 wherein the set of data collection devices are mounted on a mobile platform.

10. The system of claim 1 wherein the set of data collection devices are selected from the group consisting of:

video cameras, wireless network scanners, and geo-location gathering devices.

11. The system of claim 1 wherein:

the set of data collection devices are further adapted to collected a set of empirical data; and

the at least one processor is further adapted to associate the set of empirical data with the customer.

12. A method for collecting data, the method comprising:

collecting a set of unprocessed data from a set of vehicles at a first location;

transmitting the set of unprocessed data to a temporary storage location;

retrieving the unprocessed data from the temporary storage location;

processing the unprocessed data to generate a set of processed data;

generating a set of preferences from the set of processed data;

associating the set of processed data, the set of unprocessed data, and the set of preferences with one or more entities;

generating a set of reports from the set of processed data and the set of preferences.

13. The method of claim 12 further comprising collecting a set of video data from a set of video cameras and a set of wireless network data from a set of wireless network scanning devices.

14. The method of claim 12 wherein the set of processed data comprises customer preferences, vehicle information, residence information.

15. The method of claim 12 further comprising:

identifying a vehicle license plate number; and

generating an encrypted license plate identifier.

16. The method of claim 12 further comprising generating a confidence score.

17. The method of claim 12 wherein the processing further comprises performing optical character recognition on the set of data.

18. The method of claim 12 further comprising identifying the set of salient objects as either image data or text data.

19. The method of claim 12 further comprising:

identifying images or video sequences in the set of data that contain vehicles;

generating a set of vehicle images; and

determining at least one region of interest in the set of vehicle images.

20. The method of claim 12 wherein the collecting further comprises collecting data from data collection devices mounted on a mobile platform.

21. A method for reducing the size of an image, the method comprising:

a. receiving an image frame from an image capture device;

b. detecting a set of predefined objects in the image;

c. determining the size of each of the objects in the set of predefined objects;

d. generating a compressed image, the generating comprising;

i. determining if each object in the set of objects satisfies a minimum acceptable object size for the object, and if the size of the object does not satisfy the minimum acceptable object size, generating a resized object;

ii. determining if the size of the image frame satisfies a minimum acceptable image size for the frame, and if the size of the image frame does not satisfy the minimum acceptable image size, requesting a resized image from the image capture device;

e. transmitting the compressed image.

22. The method of claim 21 further comprising capturing the image frame at different image sizes.

23. The method of claim 21 further comprising cropping the image frame based on one or more of the detected objects.