About license plate filters

When you generate a report that includes license plates captured by an LPR camera, if you do not know the full license plate number, you can use asterisks (*) and question marks (?) to replace unknown characters.

The following Security Desk reports include the License plate filter which lets you include full or partial license plates:

Hits report
Hits (Multi-region) report
Reads report
Reads (Multi-region) report
Inventory report
Parking sessions report
Parking zones report

Full

When you select Full, you can enter the full license plate. You can also enter the wildcard characters * and ? to represent unknown characters.

Asterisks (*): You can enter one or more asterisks to represent one character, multiple characters, or no characters. For example, You know the plate starts with "A" and ends with "123", but you are not sure what is in the middle. Filtering for A*123 would include the following plates in the report:

Plate number	Report results	Reason
AB 123	Included	One character appears between "A" and "123".
ABC 123	Included	Multiple characters appear between "A" and "123".
A 123	Included	No characters appear between "A" and "123".
ABC 1234	Excluded	The plate does not end with "123".

Question mark (?): You can enter one or more question marks to represent any single character. For example, if you can't remember the first or last character in the license plate, filtering for ?BC 12? would include the following plates in the report:

Plate number	Report results	Reason
ABC 123	Included	There is one character before and after "BC 12".
5BC 12L	Included	There is one character before and after "BC 12".
AABC 123	Excluded	Each "?" can only represent one character.

Combination: You can enter a combination of asterisks and question marks. For example, filtering for A?C 1* would include the following plates in the report:

Plate number	Report results	Reason
ABC 123	Included	The "?" is replaced by "B" and there are characters after the "1".
A2C 1	Included	The "?" is replaced by "2" and there are no characters after the "1".
ABBC 123	Excluded	Each "?" can only represent one character.

Partial

Select Partial if you do not know the beginning or end of the plate number. For example, the plate read ABC 123 would only be returned with the first two plate number examples below.

NOTE: You cannot use asterisks and question marks for partial license plates.

Partial plate search	Report results	Reason
123	ABC 123 is included	The missing characters come before "123".
C12	ABC 123 is included	The missing characters come before and after "C12".
ABC 23	ABC 123 is NOT included	The missing character is in the middle of "ABC23".