Erosion is often used to remove irrelevant details from binary image

and dilation is used to fill the gaps or holes.

Median filtering generally smoothes the contour of an object, breaks
narrow isthmuses, and eliminates thin protrusions.
Flood filling also tends to smooth sections of contours but as opposed
to opening, it fuses narrow breaks and fills gaps in the contour.
Blob detection to find the large area of alphabets and digits, so can
group them together as a large region. At the same time, eliminate the
other small areas
Convolution brightening up the edges
Image cropping so that only focus on the middle part of the image
The correlation between the template and with our dataset
x is the template binary level image
xbar is the average binary level in the template image
y is the source image
ybar is the average binary level in the source image
N is the number of pixels (N= columns * rows)

Erosion is often used to remove irrelevant details from binary image

and dilation is used to fill the gaps or holes.
 Source Car Image

License plate detection -

preprocessing
Gray scale
Black & White
Median filtering
Dilation
Erosion 1
Convolution
Erosion 2
Flood fill
Only select large blob
Image Cropping

License plate character

localization and segmentation
Smearing
Find horizontal and vertical
boundaries of each digit/character

Segmented character
recognition
Database
Resize test image to same size as
database
Template Matching Method
Using correlation coefficients