Empirical Study of Car License Plates Recognition

The number of vehicles on the road has increased drastically in recent years. The license plate is an identity card for a vehicle. It can map to the owner and further information about vehicle. License plate information is useful to help traffic management systems. For example, traffic management systems can check for vehicles moving at speeds not permitted by law and can also be installed in parking areas to se-cure the entrance or exit way for vehicles. License plate recognition algorithms have been proposed by many researchers. License plate recognition requires license plate detection, segmentation, and charac-ters recognition. The algorithm detects the position of a license plate and extracts the characters. Various license plate recognition algorithms have been implemented, and each algorithm has its strengths and weaknesses. In this research, I implement three algorithms for detecting license plates, three algorithms for segmenting license plates, and two algorithms for recognizing license plate characters. I evaluate each of these algorithms on the same two datasets, one from Greece and one from Thailand. For detecting li-cense plates, the best result is obtained by a Haar cascade algorithm. After the best result of license plate detection is obtained, for the segmentation part a Laplacian based method has the highest accuracy. Last, the license plate recognition experiment shows that a neural network has better accuracy than other algo-rithm. I summarize and analyze the overall performance of each method for comparison

Automatic Vehicle Detection and Identification using Visual Features

In recent decades, a vehicle has become the most popular transportation mechanism in the world. High accuracy and success rate are key factors in automatic vehicle detection and identification. As the most important label on vehicles, the license plate serves as a mean of public identification for them. However, it can be stolen and affixed to different vehicles by criminals to conceal their identities. Furthermore, in some cases, the plate numbers can be the same for two vehicles coming from different countries. In this thesis, we propose a new vehicle identification system that provides high degree of accuracy and success rates. The proposed system consists of four stages: license plate detection, license plate recognition, license plate province detection and vehicle shape detection. In the proposed system, the features are converted into local binary pattern (LBP) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) as training dataset. To reach high accuracy in real-time application, a novel method is used to update the system. Meanwhile, via the proposed system, we can store the vehicles features and information in the database. Additionally, with the database, the procedure can automatically detect any discrepancy between license plate and vehicles

Segmenting characters from license plate images with little prior knowledge

In this paper, to enable a fast and robust system for automatically recognizing license plates with various appearances, new and simple but efficient algorithms are developed to segment characters from extracted license plate images. Our goal is to segment characters properly from a license plate image region. Different from existing methods for segmenting degraded machine-printed characters, our algorithms are based on very weak assumptions and use no prior knowledge about the format of the plates, in order for them to be applicable to wider applications. Experimental results demonstrate promising efficiency and flexibility of the proposed scheme. © 2010 IEEE

License plate localization based on statistical measures of license plate features

— License plate localization is considered as the most important part of license plate recognition system. The high accuracy rate of license plate recognition is depended on the ability of license plate detection. This paper presents a novel method for license plate localization bases on license plate features. This proposed method consists of two main processes. First, candidate regions extraction step, Sobel operator is applied to obtain vertical edges and then potential candidate regions are extracted by deploying mathematical morphology operations [5]. Last, license plate verification step, this step employs the standard deviation of license plate features to confirm license plate position. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve high quality license plate localization results with high accuracy rate of 98.26 %

Parking lot monitoring system using an autonomous quadrotor UAV

The main goal of this thesis is to develop a drone-based parking lot monitoring system using low-cost hardware and open-source software. Similar to wall-mounted surveillance cameras, a drone-based system can monitor parking lots without affecting the flow of traffic while also offering the mobility of patrol vehicles. The Parrot AR Drone 2.0 is the quadrotor drone used in this work due to its modularity and cost efficiency. Video and navigation data (including GPS) are communicated to a host computer using a Wi-Fi connection. The host computer analyzes navigation data using a custom flight control loop to determine control commands to be sent to the drone. A new license plate recognition pipeline is used to identify license plates of vehicles from video received from the drone