The number of cars in Default City that travel to the city center daily vastly exceeds the number of available parking spots. The City Council had decided to introduce parking fees to combat the pro
The number of cars in Default City that travel to the city center daily vastly exceeds the number of available parking spots. The City Council had decided to introduce parking fees to combat the problem of overspill parking on the city streets. Parking fees are enforced using an automated vehicle registration plate scanners that take a picture of the vehicle registration plate, recognize the sequence of digits and letters in the code on the plate, and check the code against a vehicle registration database to ensure that parking fees are dutifully paid or to automatically issue a fine to the vehicle owner otherwise. As soon as parking fees were introduced, a parking fee fraud had appeared. Some vehicle owners had started to close one or several digits or letters on their vehicle registration plate with pieces of paper while they park, thus making it impossible for the current version of the automated scanner to recognize their vehicle’s registration code and to issue them a fine. The Default City Council had instituted the Fraud Busters Initiative (FBI) to design a solution to prevent this kind of fraud. The overall approach that FBI had selected is to expand the number of vehicle features that scanners recognize (including features like vehicle type and color), as well as excluding from the list any vehicles that are detected to be elsewhere at this time. This information should help to identify the correct vehicle by narrowing down the search in the vehicle registration database. You are working for FBI. Your colleagues had already written all the complex pieces of the recognition software that analyses various vehicle features and provides you with a list of registration codes that might potentially belong to a scanned car. Your task it to take this list and a recognized code from the license plate (which may be partially unrecognized) and find all the registration codes that match.
