Automatic license plate recognition
Mohamed El-Adawi
Helwan Faculty of Engineering
mhhha@naseej.com
Mona Mahmoud Haragi
Helwan Faculty of Engineering
mona_haragi@hotmail.com
Abstract: Automatic license plate recognition
(LPR) is one of the techniques that can be used
for the identification of vehicles. The purpose of
this paper is to investigate a suitable way to
recognize the registration plate from an image of
vehicle, The proposed algorithm recognizes the
Arabic (Hindi)digits and words within the plate
area. The obtained recognition ratio is about 80%
for a 65 random images included in the database.
The algorithm failed only in images that include
abnormalities such as fixing screws, or a major
slant in the plate.
keywords: thresholding, edge detection, dilation,
watershed transform, template matching, OCR.
1.Introduction
There has been a number of software products
that can be used for LPR mainly from USA and
Europe.V.Kamet and S.Ganesan [1] used the
Hough transform (HT) for line detection to
locate the boundary line of the vehicle license
plate. They first applied a modified Sobel
operator for edge detection and then an image
thresholding is done depending on the average
brightness of the image. HT is applied to the
entire image, and peaks are searched in the
Hough space in which the lines are identified in
real space. Color and texture of the license plate
have been used to identify the plate lines.
J.A.G.Nijhuis [2] incorporated fuzzy features of
the license plate, using yellow rectangular area
and black characters. He used a discrete time
cellular neural network (DTCNN) as the feature
extractor and multi-layered perception (MLP) as
the recognizer. Yap Keem Siah, Tay Yong Haur,
Marzuki Khalid and Tahir Ahmed [3] used an
iterative threshold to fully exploit the large
contrast between the black color and background
and with color characters of the license plate,
They used the blob analysis method to identify
the connected regions of pixels in the image and
then the basic features(such as height, width, top
and left) of the region is calculated. These
regions are commonly know as blobs, They used
Hesham Abd el Moneim Keshk
Helwan Faculty of Engineering
h_keshk@mail.com
a fuzzy artmap neural to cluster these basic
features into different classes, The clustering
produced blobs that satisfy the original features,
which are considered as the characters of the
license plate. Xulio Fernandez and Fernando
martin [4] used the character location method to
license plate recognition, They designed an
algorithm to locate all zones in the image that
may contain characters. Their model is based on
derivatives, where they computed the horizontal
Sobel gradient of the whole image and search for
high positive values followed by a high negative
ones. They look for rectangular zones in which
they have a repetition of the pattern. The distance
between the positive values and the negative
ones must be approximately constant, Their
algorithm tries to find the possible rectangular
that enclosed the plate. Another algorithm
proposed by J.R.Cowell.[5] where he applied a
global threshold to the whole image and finds the
plate using template matching and growing
regions techniques. This method required a fixed
size for the plate area and also the same degree
of illumination, which can not be satisfied easily.
Su-Hyun Lee,Young-Soo Seok and Eung-Joo
Lee[6] proposed license plate recognition
system for multinational vehicle license plate
using geometric features along with hybrid and
seven segment pattern vectors. In the proposed
system, they suggested to find horizontal and
vertical relation after going through preparation
process with inputted real-time license plate
image of Korea and Japan, and then to classify
license plate with using characteristic and
geometric information of license plates. It
classifies the extracted license plate images into
letters and numbers, such as local name, local
number, classification character and license
consecutive numbers, and recognize license
plate of Korea and Japan by applying hybrid and
seven segments pattern vectors to classified letter
and number region. David Chanson and Timothy
Roberts [7] used Image processing techniques
such as edge detection, thresholding and
resampling in their algorithm to locate and
isolate the license plate and the characters.
Template matching was the character recognition
method that was used to successfully recognize
the license plate. Jaime José Laracuente-Díaz
and Manuel Toledo-Quiñones [8] determined to
partion the image that contains the license plate,
the different objects present in the image are
found and labeled. Those that have geometrical
characteristics similar to those of license plate
characters are selected. If the relative position of
the selected objects is consistent with a license
plate, it is assumed that the plate has been found.
2.LPR advantages and applications
One of the advantages of LPR systems is that all
cars already have or at least are supposed to have
the required identification which is the
registration plate. This means that there is no
need to add transmitters or special signs to the
vehicles, which in turn results in savings towards
the implementation of the system. Another
advantage is that the image of the car and may
be even the image of the driver can be stored and
retrieved if there is a need for evidence in
disputes or crime situations. LPR systems have
several applications ranging from allowing car
park entry to detection of stolen cars. Long term
parking at the airport is also a good candidate for
the use of an LPR system as the actual time of
entry can be retrieved in the event of a lost ticket
that was issued days ago or in case there is a
ticket fraud situation. In a border control
situation, the LPR system can be used to double
check that the car is allowed to cross and shorten
the time it takes to go through the border, hence
shortening the typical long queues. The LPR
system can also be used as a clever way of
directing traffic at the entrance of an
organization’s property. For instance, vehicles
entering could have their plates read and
they could be directed to the suitable lanes
depending on their privileges as specified in a
database. An elaborate LPR system can also be
used to monitor traffic on the roads in order to
detect stolen cars or cars with unpaid fines.
3.Proposed VLP recognition algorithm
In such algorithms, one of the most difficult
tasks is to locate the license plate, which could
be any where in the image. We make the
following assumptions about plates proposed in
this algorithm :
1.The plates have a rectangular shape with two
rows of characters.
2.The plate has dark character on a bright white
back ground.
3.The width-height relationship of the license
plate is approximately known in advance.
4.The orientation of the license plate is
approximately aligned with the axes(vertical and
horizontal).
5.Lines of image must not be optically distorted.
We have been working with color images
captured with a digital camera and transferred to
computer memory. Our images consist of a
rectangular array of 640*480 pixels. Fig.1 shows
a sample of such images.
Fig.1 Car image with recognizable LP
3.1 Extraction of the license plate
The purpose of this stage is to locate the plate
that encloses the license number. The whole idea
depends on the boundary of the license plate
only because there are a huge data in the image.
The algorithm tries to decrease the amount of
data in the image and avoid the unwanted areas
to extract only the area which have the same
properties of the license plate. Our proposed
algorithm goes as follow:
1- Thresholding of the input image.
After turn the input color image to a grayscale,
we compute a global threshold level that can be
used to convert a gray image to a binary image.
In a grayscale image, the thresholding
transformation sets each gray level that is less
than or equal to a chosen value T ( the threshold
value ) to 0 and each gray level greater than T
to 1.The result is a black and white image with 0
representing black and 1 representing white. In
our algorithm the threshold value is not constant,
Iit depends on the average brightness of the
image. We used the otsu’s method [9] to
determine that value.Figs.2 and 3 show the
applications of different threshold values to
convert the image into binary image.

Fig.2 The computed threshold is 127
Fig.3 The computed threshold is 92
2- Apply a thin edge detector
If an image consists of objects of interest on a
contrasting background, an edge is a transition
from background to object or vice versa. The
total change in intensity from background to
object is called the strength of the edge. There
are many methods of performing edge detection.
We detected the edges here by using the spatial
filtering. We used convolution kernel for
horizontal direction [-1 1]and for vertical
direction is [-1;1].Those values will help us to
detect any thin edge in the image as shown in
fig.4
Fig.4 Horizontal and vertical edge detector
3- Dilation the image.
The obtained image after edge detector is one
pixel thickness for each edge. If there is any
ripples on any line, then the line will appear as a
broken one. To avoid this problem we will make
a dilation for all lines in both horizontal and
vertical directions as shown in fig.5
Fig.5 Dilation in both directions
4- Reject small lines that are impossible to be
a part of the plate borders in both directions.
For each point checking if there is a new point in
the same line within certain distance. If it is, the
line segment is extended to include the new point;
otherwise a new line segment is started. In this
project the maximum distance, was chosen as the
value which gave the best results for the training
images. Also, as some of the line segments are
potentially very short, specifying a minimum
line segment length is advantageous and helps
reduce computation in later steps. The long lines
segments from the image have been extracted.
The short lines segment in the letters and in the
top part have been eliminated. Fig.6 shows the
output of the line extract process.
Fig.6 Image after limination of short lines and
extraction of long lines
5- Now we have a group of lines in horizontal
and vertical direction with different lengths. By
adding the two images, we obtain many regions
with different areas. We used the watershed
transform to segment those regions each with it’s
properties. Fig.7shows the result of the adding .
Fig.7 Adding image
The watershed transform is the method of choice
for image segmentation in the field of
mathematical morphology. The watershed
transform can be classified as a region-based
segmentation approach. The intuitive idea
underlying this method comes from geography,
It is that of a landscape or to pographic relief
which is flooded by water. Watersheds being the
divide lines of the domains of attraction of rain
falling over regions. An a alternative approach is
to imagine the landscape being immersed in a
lake, with holes pierced in local minima. Basins
(also called ‘catchments basins') will fill up with
water starting at these local minima, and, at
points where water coming from different basins
would meet, dams are built. When the water
level has reached the highest peak in the
landscape, the process is stopped. As a result, the
landscape is partitioned into regions or basins
separated by dams, called watershed lines or
simply watersheds. When simulating this process
for image segmentation, two approaches may be
used: either one first finds basins, then
watersheds by taking a set complement; or one
computes a complete partition of the image into
basins, and subsequently finds the watersheds by
boundary detection. To be more explicit, we will
use the expression `watershed transform’ to
denote a labeling of the image, such that all
points of a given catchments basin have the same
unique label, and a special label, distinct from all
the labels of the catchments basins, is assigned to
all points of the watersheds. Fig.8 shows the
output of the watershed transform [10].
technique, which depends strongly on
comparing each portion of the investigated
image to a template image(shown in fig.9).The
true license plate in the image is found as the
region bearing the most resemblance to the
template.
Fig.9 the proposed template image
A common way to perform this task is to use a
cross correlation scheme[11].Fig.10(a) shows an
example of a true plat be selected, and the
corresponding a mesh of the cross correlation
factor where the maximum value is 18400.
Fig.10(b) shows an example of a true plat be
selected, and the corresponding a mesh of the
cross correlation factor where the maximum
value is 9000.
18400

Fig.10(a) Cross correlation with true plate

9000
1 2 3

Fig.8 watershed transform output

6- As mentioned, the output from watershed Fig.10(b) Cross correlation with false region
segmentation consists of a list of regions, of
which one hopefully contains the license plate. 3.2 character segmentation:
Two steps are performed in order to select the 1.The next step after the identification of the
best candidate. rectangular plate is to isolate its characters or
Area: The candidate region with small area or digit contents. All plate rectangle are assumed to
which have very large area will be voided, contain two rows of characters. For the image,
Height- width ratio: Although some times a we need to isolate the two lines as shown in
region with the license plate will contain some fig.11.
edges around the actual plate, the ratio provides a
mean of sorting out a lot of regions that could
not possibly contain a license plate.
7- In some cars we found that the back light
indicators have almost the same characteristics
of the plate (area and ratio between width and
height) as shown in fig.8(regions number 1 and
3). To distinguish between such false areas and
the true license plate (as shown in fig.8 region
number 2 ), we used a template matching Fig.11 the extract plate and the required isolation

To do this we calculate the horizontal
summation of all black pixels in each row. The
peaks of the summation will identify the two
rows of characters as shown in fig.12. The two
arrows point to the location of the number and
registration parts.
Fig.12 The horizontal projection
2.After isolating the two rows of characters
within the plate area, we take the digits row
alone and try to isolate each digit.
3.On the digits row we vertically count the
number of black pixels in each column.
This is actually a vertical projection. The peaks
of the projection will represent the existence of a
digit, and the valley will represent the isolation
or boundary between these digits. Fig.13 shows
this projection.
Fig.13 The vertical projection
3.3 Character identification:
The final task of the LPR is the recognition of
the plate contents after the isolation process in
the pervious step. We used a 3 layer neural
network trained with the back propagation
algorithm to identify the following objects in
each plate :-
1.The digits from 0 to 9.
2.The word " ‫" ﻣﻼ آـــﻲ‬.
3.The two word "‫" اﻟﻘـﺎهﺮة‬and "‫" اﻟﺠﻴﺰة‬that exits in
all cars that are registered in either Cairo or
El_giza.
We used ten plate from the " ‫" ﻣﻼ آـــﻲ اﻟﻘـﺎهﺮة‬
registration and another ten from the
" ‫ " ﻣﻼ آـــﻲ ﺝﻴـﺰة‬registration as the training set
for the neural network. The remaining plate
images were used for testing. The performance
of the neural network was very good.
Fig.14 The two types of plate registration
4.Experimental results:
The system was tested for 65 images under
several conditions. The recognition ratio was
very good (almost 80%).The 20%wrong
identification came from the fixation screws of
the plate that was recognized as zero. If the
distance between camera and car was larger than
certain limit, the system fails to correctly identify
the plate. Fig 15(a)and fig.15(b)shows the
application of the proposed algorithm and the
response of the program was to identify the plate
number and its registration.
Fig.15(a)
Fig.15(b)
5.Interpretation of results:
We test the algorithm on 65 various images, the
results are as follows:
• 89% success rate for license plate
recognition, the algorithm failed in
recognition the plates which has a major
slant.
• 93% success rate for character
recognition of the extracted plates, the
failed occurs for the plate which has
fixing screws in the character position.
• 96% success rate for character
recognition of all the characters on the
extracted plates, the illumination and
 the blurring of the characters was the [7] License plate recognition system ,David
main reason of the failed cases. Chanson and Timothy Roberts,Department of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,Manukau
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mainly different with the characteristics of the Díaz and Manuel Toledo-Quiñones Electrical
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that our work has a good ratio (80%) against to University of Puerto Rico,Mayagüez Campus
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