Programming project

I've been thinking lately of doing the science fair this year. That depends if i do get time to write the program. What I basically want to do is to create a augmented reality program. The idea is that you will have a camera at the front of a car, which will take a live stream of everything in front of the car. The program will read the license plates and will pull up information about the driver from a database. It won't be name and DOB and that kind of stuff. It will rather be any infractions the person committed, so you would now if the driver in front of you has had a history of DUI or hit and runs. It could also tell you whether the car is stolen or not so the proper law enforcements could be contacted. 

I guess at the end more features can be added. This would include methods to figure out the lights at the intersection for example.

However, there are some problems with my original idea. While for most cars the license plate is clearly visible, there are some cars where the paint is faded. This could be solved by replacing the reading of the license plate with a piece of hardware in each car that would transmit its license plate and all this other info to all the cars around it in a 10m radius. Then the info could be displayed in the corner of an HUD on the windshield. I looked into HUD displays, but something that big seems a bit hard to do. There are some alternatives though. At CES, this year, I think it was Sony that had a laptop with a transparent display. The colors were incredibly vivid for the 40% transparent display. I guess you could put the same thing instead of a windshield. It would definitely occupy a lot less space than an HUD, as for an HUD you need a projector as well.

I think for the purpose of the science fair I will stick to my camera version, and assume that the license plates are visible. Well actually I have no idea, as in order to see the cars in front of you, a high-res picture will be needed, so OCR should take some time on it. This would make everything lag quite a bit, so in the end IF i am to do it, I'll stick to hardware. I haven't thought that much about that, so no idea how i'll realize that in terms of protocols. Bluetooth maybe since most new cars have that anyway? Not sure about the radius of the blue tooth though

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