Automatic Vehicle Number Plate Recognition for Vehicle Parking Management System

A license plate recognition (LPR) system is one type of intelligent transportation system (ITS). It is a type of technology in which the software enables computer system to read automatically the license number plate of vehicle from digital pictures. Reading automatically the number plate means converting the pixel information of digital image into the ASCII text of the number plate. This paper discuses a method for the vehicle number plate recognition from the image using mathematical morphological operations. The main objective is to use different morphological operations in such a way that the number plate of vehicle can be identified accurately. This is based on various operation such as image enhancement, morphological transformation, edge detection and extraction of number plate from vehicle image. After this segmentation is applied to recognize the characters present on number plate using template matching. This algorithm can recognize number plate quickly and accurately from the vehicles image. Keywords: ANPR, ITS, Image Enhancement, Edge Detection, Morphological Operation, Number Plate Extraction,  Template Matching

Automatic Vehicle Tracking System Based on Fixed Thresholding and Histogram Based Edge Processing

Automatic detection, extraction and recognition of vehicle number plate region in traffic control systems is one of the prominent application in Computer vision. The drastic increase in number of vehicles in the current generation greatly increases the complexity in tracking the vehicles through the human visual system, manual procedure of controlling traffic and enforcement of various laws and rules is not sufficient for smooth control of traffic. This urges the need for development of technology that can automate this process. This paper mainly focuses on the development of an automatic number plate extraction and recognition algorithm by incorporating constructs like edge detection, horizontal and vertical edge processing using fixed threshold technique. The extracted number plate region is again processed using template matching algorithm for the recognition of the characters embossed on the number plate with respect to every individual piece of number plate. The algorithm developed has achieved an accuracy of around 100% and works for both front and rear images of the car

Template Neural Particle Optimization For Vehicle License Plate Recognition

The need for vehicle recognition has emerged from cases such as security, smart toll collections and traffic monitoring systems. This type of applications produces high demands especially on the accuracy of license plate recognition (LPR). The challenge of LPR is to select the best method for recognizing characters. Since the importance of LPR arises over times, there is a need to find the best alternative to overcome the problem. The detection and extraction of license plate is conventionally based on image processing methods. The image processing method in license plate recognition generally comprises of five stages including pre-processing, morphological operation, feature extraction, segmentation and character recognition. Pre-processing is an initial step in image processing to improve image quality for more suitability in visualizing perception or computational processing while filtering is required to solve contrast enhancement, noise suppression, blurry issue and data reduction. Feature extraction is applied to locate accurately the license plate position and segmentation is used to find and segment the isolated characters on the plates, without losing features of the characters. Finally, character recognition determines each character, identity and displays it into machine readable form. This study introduces five methods of character recognition namely template matching (TM), back-propagation neural network (BPNN), Particle Swarm Optimization neural network (PSONN), hybrid of TM with BPNN (TM-BPNN) and hybrid of TM with PSONN (TM-PSONN). PSONN is proposed as an alternative to train feed-forward neural network, while TM-BPNN and TM-PSONN are proposed to produce a better recognition result. The performance evaluation is carried out based on mean squared error, processing time, number of training iteration, correlation value and percentage of accuracy. The performance of the selected methods was analyzed by making use real images of 300 vehicles. The hybrid of TM-BPNN gives the highest recognition result with 94% accuracy, followed by the hybrid of TM-PSONN with 91.3%, TM with 77.3%, BPNN with 61.7% and lastly PSONN with 37.7%

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

KWh-meter Number Recognition using Normalized Cross-Correlation Technique

Electricity demand has become a major requirement for modern society. Many complaints forwarded by the customer's electrical system is recording kWh-meter that sometimes less accurate. This study aims to design an application that can detect the number shown on the kWh-meter automatically, to then be sent by the registrar to the office in a text format. Process starting from the introduction of image acquisition, image conversion into grayscale format, thresholding, cropping, normalization, segmentation, template matching, and identification of patterns of numbers. System implementation using Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 with OpenCV 2.4.6. Testing the accuracy of the resulting application includes image recognition rate, which compares the process of automatically and manually. From the experimental results, the average recognition error is 20.7%, hence the accuracy of recognition using this technique is 79.3%

IMPLEMENTATION OF IMAGE PROCESSING IN THE RECOGNITION OF OFFICIAL VEHICLE LICENSE PLATES

Vehicle license plates are identifiers used to uniquely identify vehicles. However, to identify vehicle license plates there are several problems encountered, namely the different formats of vehicle license plates that make license plate recognition more complicated, vehicle license plates often contain visually similar combinations of letters and numbers (for example the letter "O" and the number "0" or the letter "I" and the number "1"), . in poor lighting conditions license plates may not be clearly visible. To solve this problem, image recognition, image processing, and pattern recognition technologies can be used. The three technologies can be used to recognize characters on vehicle license plates, but cannot yet be used to recognize the colors contained on vehicle license plates. The purpose of this research is to identify and record vehicle license plate numbers quickly and accurately, monitor the presence of vehicles in a supervised area, assist in managing parking, reduce the need for human interaction in the vehicle identification process, The methods used to recognize motor vehicle plates are edge detection and character segmentation which involves image processing to detect the edges of the vehicle plate, followed by segmentation of individual characters in the plate. Another method used is optical character recognition which involves using an optical sensor to take an image of a vehicle plate, then using character recognition techniques to identify the numbers and letters on the plate. The result of this research is that the motor vehicle number recognition system can work in various lighting conditions and poor weather conditions and can monitor and control vehicles in the parking area. The finding obtained from this research is that no method has been used for color recognition on motor vehicle plates