Automatic car registration plate recognition using fast Hough transform

Gendy, S.; Smith, C.L.; Lachowicz, S.; Sch. of Eng., Edith Cowan Univ., Perth, WA Issue Date: 15-17 Oct 1997 On page(s): 209 - 218 Meeting Date: 15 Oct 1997 - 17 Oct 1997 Location: Canberra, ACT , Australia Print ISBN: 0-7803-3913-4 INSPEC Accession Number: 5754023 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/CCST.1997.626271 Date of Current Version: 06 August 2002

ABSTRACT The development of automatic car registration plate recognition will provide greater efficiency for vehicle monitoring in automatic zone access control. Plate recognition will avoid the need to equip vehicles with special RF tags, since all vehicles possess a unique registration number plate. Also the proposed recognition system can be used in conjunction with a tag system for higher security. There are a number of techniques which have been used for car registration plate characters recognition. These systems include BAM (Bidirectional Associative Memories) neural network character recognition and pattern matching of characters as two character recognition techniques which will be discussed in this paper. The object of this paper is to explore the potential of using Fast Hough Transform (FHT) in vehicle registration plate recognition. Image processing techniques have been used to extract plate characters, then FHT algorithm is applied to every character in the image for recognition and identification. The FHT used in the paper is an efficient, fast and simple algorithm to identify characters, without requiring a relatively large memory

License plate detection system by using threshold function and improved template matching method
Yohimori, S.; Mitsukura, Y.; Fukumi, M.; Akamatsu, N.; Pedrycz, N.; Dept. of Inf. Sci. & Intelligent Syst., Tokushima Univ., Japan Issue Date: 27-30 June 2004 On page(s): 357 - 362 Vol.1 ISSN: Print ISBN: 0-7803-8376-1 Cited by : 1 INSPEC Accession Number: 8161644 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/NAFIPS.2004.1336308 Date of Current Version: 27 September 2004

ABSTRACT License plate recognition is very important in an automobile society. However, it is very difficult to do it, because a background and a car surface color can be similar to that of the license plate. Furthermore, detection of cars moving at a very high-speed is difficult to be done. We propose a new method to extract a car license plate automatically by using a genetic algorithm (GA). By using GA, the most likely plate colors are decided under various light conditions. First, the average brightness Y values of images are calculated. Next, relationship between the Y value and the most likely plate color thresholds (upper and lower bounds)

are obtained by GA to estimate threshold equations by using the RLS algorithm. Finally, in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we show simulation examples by using real images.

Automatic Vehicle Registration System for Tollbooths

Ranjan, K.R.; Sinha, A.; Dept. of Electron. & Comm. Eng., Nat. Inst. of Technol., Hamirpur, India Issue Date: Feb. 28 2011-March 3 2011 On page(s): 1 - 3 Location: Chennai Print ISBN: 978-1-4577-0786-5 References Cited: 10 INSPEC Accession Number: 12094487 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/WIRELESSVITAE.2011.5940823 Date of Current Version: 05 July 2011

ABSTRACT With the advancement in computation, the era of automatic systems is rapidly taking over. Image processing is an essential tool being widely used in effective solutions concerning such systems. In our paper entitled Automatic Vehicle Registration System for Tollbooths, we propose the use of image processing techniques for optimal character recognition in a license plate. We have proposed an effective algorithm to extract the digits from the license plate of a vehicle which can be used to fully automatize the access system at the barrier gate. The algorithm accounts for various anomalies in the system which may include movements at the gates and so on. The system proposed by us for calculation of tariff using the different image processing techniques has also been explained in detail. Its advantages over conventional system include low installation and maintenance cost amongst others.

An Algorithm for License Plate Intelligent Transportation System

Ying Wen; Yue Lu; Jingqi Yan; Zhenyu Zhou; Columbia Univ., New York, NY, USA

Recognition
Pengfei Shi;

Applied

to

von Deneen, K.M.;

Issue Date: Sept. 2011 Volume: 12 Issue:3 On page(s): 830 - 845 ISSN: 1524-9050 References Cited: 54 INSPEC Accession Number: 12206872 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TITS.2011.2114346 Date of Publication: 03 March 2011 Date of Current Version: 30 August 2011 Sponsored by: IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society

ABSTRACT An algorithm for license plate recognition (LPR) applied to the intelligent transportation system is proposed on the basis of a novel shadow removal technique and character recognition algorithms. This paper has two major contributions. One contribution is a new binary method, i.e., the shadow removal method, which is based on the improved Bernsen algorithm combined with the Gaussian filter. Our second contribution is a character recognition algorithm known as support vector machine (SVM) integration. In SVM integration, character features are extracted from the elastic mesh, and the entire address character string is taken as the object of study, as opposed to a single character. This paper also presents improved techniques for image tilt correction and image gray enhancement. Our algorithm is robust to the variance of illumination, view angle, position, size, and color of the license plates when working in a complex environment. The algorithm was tested with 9026 images, such as natural-scene vehicle images using different backgrounds and ambient illumination particularly for low-resolution images. The license plates were properly located and segmented as 97.16% and 98.34%, respectively. The optical character recognition system is the SVM integration with different character features, whose performance for numerals, Kana, and address recognition reached 99.5%, 98.6%, and 97.8%, respectively. Combining the preceding tests, the overall performance of success for the license plate achieves 93.54% when the system is used for LPR in various complex conditions.