re: Flock rolls out new toys far beyond license plate readers

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read a vehicle's license plate from as far as 2,000 feet away.

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Whether day or night, and I'm writing from direct experience in the technology, that requires a huge amount of really fast computing power utilizing very expensive video processing and algorithms that can make adjustments in real-time or about a 5-7 frames delay. Part of the issue is from that distance having to overcome natural air scintillation, which are thermal heat waves that radiate upwards from the Earth into the air. It won't be an actual video, especially at night, but one that has been processed through multiple algorithms. So what you get is a digital representation of what the internal processing 'thinks' is the correct license plate number. Plus, the camera has to be completely stable and not subject to wind pressures. I did it at a distance of 1000 meters using a FLIR camera and a 1500mm lens and the camera was using a heavy welded steel tube tripod sitting on ground isolation pads to eliminate ground waves from passing vehicles 500 yards away with 300 lbs of sandbag weight holding it all in a highly stable platform. Even then, we were unable to read the license plates because of scintillation. But, we used an outboard specialized computer that cost over $25k to feed the video to and using we were able to read a license plate, in the daytime, at 1000 meters. At night it's more difficult and an extreme low light sensor has a huge amount of read noise. The best we could do was to read a lit license plate, at night, was 500 meters and unlit at night with no city lights was about 300 meters.

If they live stream to an outboard processor, that image is digitized and then it's basically garbage in/garbage out. None of this should stand up in court as the video is significantly digitally altered by algorithms. What you get is what the computer 'thinks' it is, not what it actually is.