I would have thought the number of known-stolen plates would be small enough you could push the entire list out to the device.
Google reckons there's only 4.5 million registered vehicles in Victoria (.au) - with 6 character [A-Z0-9] = 36bit/5byte plates that's only gonna need ~22 meg to store them all and you've got a few bits for "flags" - even if 10% of them are listed as stolen at any time, you'd only need a couple of meg for the "stolen car list" - even without handwaving away the overhead for the data structure, this seems a reasonable solution. If you want the make/model/colour info you could then just query the remote db when you get a hit for a plate with the "stolen" flag set (or perhaps the "vehicle of interest" flag).
Of course nobody's gonna build it that way, because then you lose the data set of plate locations you can own without needing to ask for consent. This will, of course, store GPS location and timestamp of every plate is acquires, and if they're being particularly audacious, the actual imagery captured as well. That's how you make this a $80mil project... :-/
(Of course private industry already has this - tow trucks carry alpr rigs and sell the data to repo agencies in the US, I'm told...)
Google reckons there's only 4.5 million registered vehicles in Victoria (.au) - with 6 character [A-Z0-9] = 36bit/5byte plates that's only gonna need ~22 meg to store them all and you've got a few bits for "flags" - even if 10% of them are listed as stolen at any time, you'd only need a couple of meg for the "stolen car list" - even without handwaving away the overhead for the data structure, this seems a reasonable solution. If you want the make/model/colour info you could then just query the remote db when you get a hit for a plate with the "stolen" flag set (or perhaps the "vehicle of interest" flag).
Of course nobody's gonna build it that way, because then you lose the data set of plate locations you can own without needing to ask for consent. This will, of course, store GPS location and timestamp of every plate is acquires, and if they're being particularly audacious, the actual imagery captured as well. That's how you make this a $80mil project... :-/
(Of course private industry already has this - tow trucks carry alpr rigs and sell the data to repo agencies in the US, I'm told...)