NUMBER PLATE SEGMENTATION

A quick technological development in the area of computer image processing and constantly increasing need for efficient and cheap security and steering systems resulted in the development of different kinds of solutions based on computer picture analysis. One type of these solutions is automatic car identification systems basing on localization and recognition of the license plates. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) which is also known as Number Plate Recognition (NPR) or License Plate Recognition (LPR) is a system for automated identification of vehicle number plates. License plate recognition/identification (LPR/I) applies image processing and character recognition technology to identify vehicles by automatically reading their license plates. This allows cars to be tracked and their whereabouts to be documented in real-time. Its uses range from calculating the time someone has spent in a car-park of a superstore to counter-terrorism surveillance of ports and airports. They can form the bases for automatic systems steering the access to protected areas i.e. a car park, route traffic monitoring systems, offences and crimes on public routes. Color is important in human perception for accurately reading license plate numbers printed on busy backgrounds, and may be essential when characters cannot be separated from the background by luminance alone. Color image segmentation extracts the connected regions satisfying similarity criteria based on the features. The LPR algorithm consists of three main steps: 1) License plate locating. 2) Character segmentation. 3) Character recognition. Step 1: Locating the license plate from the image consisting of some part of car:-Our area of interest is only the license plate, so in this step we locate only the license number plate from the image. Step 2: By locating the license plate the further process of segmenting alphanumeric from number plate becomes easier. In this work we attempt to classify image pixels into character (foreground) or non-character (background) pixels. This project is based on the concept of image segmentation. The input is an image consisting of number plate. Project works on the number plate and segmented alphanumeric are displayed as output. y Main stages in the process: 1. Capturing the image having number plate. 2. Cropping the number plate. 3. Resizing the cropped image. 4. Black and White image quantization. 5. Image noise reduction. 6. Image Segmentation. 7. Individual alphanumeric recognition.