I actually worked for a license plate entry company for about 3 weeks last year. The toll roads that we covered have electronic tags on the cars backed up by several cameras. If the tag doesn’t register, we would enter the plate characters and state. Our pay was connected to our speed and accuracy. Every plate ended being entered by 3 people. If there was disagreement, auditors would take a closer look.
The system produced less than 0.5% error rate, if I recall correctly. They burned through people. Only a few could average a plate every 6 seconds over a week. We had OCR to suggest the characters, but it had gotten worse with every software revision for years. My manager was blurringly fast, and knew every style of plate and font with eerie precision. “No the third character of those plates is always a letter, and that zero next to it is hand drawn. Mark as altered, and move on.”
Turns out a career of double checking everything I type ruined me for that job. With only 6 seconds to make a plate determination, the folk typing aren’t going to do much about a silly name. And the folk writing our software at least ran out of fucks to give years ago.
