Denmark

Traffic management at Øresund Bridge

A route with a daily traffic of almost 20,000 vehicles (!) have a crucial need: the smooth flow of traffic with no traffic jams, all these in a way that remains safe. Learn how.

About the location

The Öresund or Øresund Bridge is a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Öresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island Peberholm in the middle of the strait.

Quick project facts

Product: Carmen® license plate recognition software
Key functionality: Border control registration, traffic management
Adaptive Recognition Partner: Kapsch TrafficCom AB
End user: Government of Denmark

The location

The Øresund (or Öresund) Bridge is a combined railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres from the Swedish coast to the artificial island Peberholm in the middle of the strait. The crossing is completed by the 4-kilometre Drogden Tunnel from Peberholm to the Danish island of Amager.

The challenge

Such route with a daily traffic of almost 20,000 vehicles (!) has a crucial need: the smooth flow of traffic with no traffic jams, all these in a way that remains safe.

At the land borders between Sweden and Denmark, a key contributing factor is the processing speed of each vehicle. It is of utmost importance for both the government and those who actually cross the borders, because short time delays add up really quickly and easily slow down the traffic. Avoiding any delay is even more vital in the peak hours of a day, when each saved second may mean a huge difference.

The solution

This is why the border control process is aided by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), to detect and register all license plates of crossing vehicles. The process is fully automatic, done by traffic cameras which supply the images to the industry leader Carmen^® recognition engine. Besides the automatic character recognition, the license plate data can be easily cross-checked with any stolen vehicle database and other law enforcement systems.

Carmen^® works with every camera model and provides exceptionally high accuracy, even in low light conditions. No matter if it is night or day, sunny or rainy, the software digitalizes the plates with no exception. Besides the Øresund bridge project, a long list of other border control locations benefits from the same technology.

Learn more about Carmen®, the industry leader ANPR software: