
Philly cops used surveillance van marked 'Google Maps' - gist
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160514_Philly_cops_used_surveillance_van_marked__Google_Maps_.html
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sbierwagen

      It quoted a Kansas man with experience in public-safety 
      technology as saying the van contained gear including "infrared 
      cameras to find plate numbers and letters via temperature 
      differentials between those characters and the surrounding 
      background through optical character recognition."
    

This guy is confusing near infrared (0.75 µm) with thermal infrared. (8–15 µm)

Near infrared cameras are cheap. Thermal infrared cameras are expensive
(exotic materials needed for the optics) and have poor resolution, which makes
them a really poor choice for machine vision stuff. License plate cameras are
near infrared.

