작성일자: 2013.6.4

작성자: 쿠알라룸푸르 무역관 박건원 (gunwony@kotra.or.kr)

1. Demand Trend

 ○ The development of automatic car license plate recognition system has resulted in greater efficiency for vehicle monitoring system. Car plate recognition systems are used commercially, both in overseas and locally.

 ○ In Malaysia, however, the usage of car plate recognition system is restricted to the ordinary car plates. This means that the system is unable to detect special types of car plates.

 ○ This is because Malaysian license plates differ in styles and formats. The license plate for normal private vehicles has black background and white characters as shown below.

 ○ Generally, at the moment, the car license plate recognition system application is not widely used and the market is quite niche and limited.

 ○ Ever since crimes have been rampant in Malaysia, many major shopping malls and certain commercial and residential buildings started to install such parking management system to enhance their security.

 ○ More and more new and upcoming property development has used this license plate recognition system as part of their added features. Most of these are usually in upscale and luxurious projects.

 ○ All these are only meant for security purposes and the ones with added feature of paying for parking is however very limited in Malaysia. LPR systems is applied usually to control incoming and outgoing of vehicles and also for parking management, security control and illegal usage prevention of traffic card as well as to the wide field of security area.

 ○ Various problems from the conventional parking system can be solved by obtaining concrete data based on recorded images.

 ○ License Plate Recognition System is usually used with an existing closed-circuit television or road-rule enforcement cameras or ones specifically designed for the task. The system can be used to store the images captured by the cameras as well as the text from the license plate, with some configurable to store a photograph of the driver.

 ○ The Centre of Technology and Innovation(CTI) also developed a License Plate Recognition technology called The Car License Plate Extraction & Recognition Technology(CARPET). It has been implemented at all Malaysian Borders crossing points (75 lanes) for monitoring vehicles leaving the country for immigration purposes. It is also implemented at the Malaysian Police Headquarters, Bukit Aman for purposes of tracking vehicle entry and exit.

 ○ There is also the purpose of using this license plate recognition technology as part of verification process. This only allows registered plate number to enter the parking space. The system includes display and automated gate as part of the package. One such place using this system is at the JKR(Ministry of Works) Headquarters building in Kuala Lumpur in which its objective is to automatically monitoring and controlling vehicle access into the building.

 ○ Most parking management solutions provider commented that the demand for vehicle license recognition system is on project basis.

2. Competition Status

 ○ Since the market is generally very limited, the competition in this industry is not very stiff as well.

 ○ Most of the parking operators claim that such license plate recognition system is not suitable for every area, and it is only limited to those high class residential or commercial areas and major shopping malls.

 ○ Besides, the parking management system is basically divided to interior parking or outside parking. Some customers do not see a point of installing such recognition system in their area as there is no such need.

 ○ According to the parking management solutions provider, most of the Car Plate Recognition System comes from European countries like Germany and Italy (for higher end sytems) whereas for middle range to lower end systems, it usually comes from Taiwan.

 ○ There are a few brands of vehicle number recognition systems that are common in Malaysia, such as:

  - GeoVision Inc (Taiwan)

  - TrafficScan (Denmark)

  - IMPS (Integrated Multi-Pass System) (Singapore)

 ○ However, most of the companies involved are reluctant to reveal about the brands that are available in the market, stating that it is private and confidential.

 ○ Therefore, not much information can be obtained about the competitiveness in this industry.

 ○ There is a local Malaysian company which develops its own vehicle plate recognition system known as IWIGUS. The company is called Nafa Technology. More information can be found at their website, www.nafa.my.

 ○ Generally, as long as the reliability of the system and the accuracy of the technology are there, there should be no problem in penetrating into the local industry as it is still in a developing state.

 ○ Customers need to be educated about the importance about the system and need to be convinced of why there is a need to install such recognition system. As long as the costs are affordable and not much difference with the conventional parking system, there will be a huge market potential for it in the future.