Couple fined after bus lane camera photographs text on woman's top

ocrcomputer-visionautomated-enforcementfailure-case

Abstraction: Automated camera misread T-shirt text as a vehicle license plate

Key points:

A Surrey couple (David and Paula Knight) received a £90 bus lane fine from Bath council despite never being near Bath.
CCTV evidence showed not a car but a pedestrian in a T-shirt reading "knitter" — OCR matched "KN19 TER," the couple's registration plate.
Fine had auto-escalated from £60 to £90 because 30 days had passed without payment before the error was caught.
Council waived the fine after being contacted; a human reviewing the image would have caught the error immediately.
Illustrates a failure mode of automated enforcement: no human review before penalty issuance.

Connections: Computer Vision · Ocr