Developed in the UK as a Counter Terrorism measure and now used by English Police Departments, Automatic License Plate Recognition systems work by capturing digital images of vehicle license plates as they pass an "in car" camera, or a fixed installation. Civica Software PlateScan is a proprietary neural network recognition engine which automatically scans, recognizes, and cross-checks license plates in real time against a number of local and national databases to identify vehicles that are of interest to the Police and Homeland Security agencies.