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

ECCH: A novel color coocurrence histogram

In this paper, a novel color cooccurrence histogram method, named eCCH which stands for color cooccurrence histogram at edge points, is proposed to describe the spatial-color joint distribution of images. Unlike all existing ideas, we only investigate the color distribution of pixels located at the two sides of edge points on gradient direction lines. When measuring the similarity of two eCCHs, the Gaussian weighted histogram intersection method is adopted, where both identical and similar color pairs are considered to compensate color variations. Comparative experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed eCCH in terms of robustness to color variance and small computational complexity. ©2010 IEEE

The long-term effects of alfalfa on soil water content in the Loess Plateau of northwest China

Soil desiccation is the most serious problem in forest vegetations and grassland, which lead to widespread land degradation in the Loess Plateau of China. The soil water variations at 0 to 1000 cm depth of different vegetations were studied to explore the hydrological effects of vegetations and determine the optimal length of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) phase at the Zhenyuan Agri-ecological Station of the Loess Plateau in China. Eight treatments were designed in this study: waste land, wheat land and six continuous growing alfalfa treatments, including 4-year-old (4 year), 6-year-old (6 year), 8- year-old (8 year), 12-year-old (12 year), 18-year-old (18 year) and 26-year-old (26 year) alfalfa grasslands.  Results showed that the wheat field had the best soil water content and no dry soil layer, while slightly dry soil layer occurred in wasteland and 4, 6 and 8 year alfalfa grasslands. After alfalfa grew for > 8 years, moderately dry soil layer appeared in the grassland and expanded beyond 500 cm soil depth. The result also showed that wheat field, wasteland and the alfalfa grasslands growing for 4, 6 and 8 years had no unfavorable impacts on the ecological environments of the soil moisture but the grasslands for 12, 18 and 26 years did exert relatively stronger unfavorable influences on the hydrological effects. Considering all the factors, this study recommends that the optimal length of alfalfa phase should be 8 years.Key words: Different vegetation, alfalfa grasslands, soil water content, ecological effect, soil desiccation, Loess Plateau of China

Symmetric color ratio in spiral architecture

Color ratio gradient (CRG) is a robust method used for color image retrieval and object recognition. It has been proven to be illumination-independent and geometry-insensitive when tested on scenery images. However, the color ratio gradient produces unsatisfying matching results when dealing with an object which appears rotated by a certain relative angle in the model and target images. In this paper, we adopt the idea of color ratio gradient and develop a new method called Symmetric Color Ratio (SCR) based on a hexagonal image structure, the Spiral Architecture (SA). We focus on license plate images and our aim is to achieve a higher matching rate between the SCR histogram of the images within same class in order to separate different classes of images. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SCR is robust to changes over view angles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

A fast algorithm for license plate detection in various conditions

This paper proposes a fast algorithm detecting license plates in various conditions. There are three main contributions in this paper. The first contribution is that we define a new vertical edge map, with which the license plate detection algorithm is extremely fast. The second contribution is that we construct a cascade classifier which is composed of two kinds of classifiers. The classifiers based on statistical features decrease the complexity of the system. They are followed by the classifiers based on Haar-features, which make it possible to detect license plate in various conditions. Our algorithm is robust to the variance of the illumination, view angle, the position, size and color of the license plates when working in complex environment. The third contribution is that we experimentally analyze the relations of the scaling factor with detection rate and processing time. On the basis of the analysis, we select the optimal scaling factor in our algorithm. In the experiments, both high detection rate (with low false positive rate) and high speed are achieved when the algorithm is used to detect license plates in various complex conditions. © 2006 IEEE

Refined Gaussian weighted histogram intersection and its application in number plate categorization

This paper proposes a refined Gaussian weighted histogram intersection for content-based image matching and applies the method for number plate categorization. Number plate images are classified into two groups based on their colour similarities with the model image of each group. The similarities of images are measured by the matching rates between their colour histograms. Histogram intersection (HI) is used to calculate the matching rates of histograms. Since the conventional histogram intersection algorithm is strictly based on the matching between bins of identical colours, the final matching rate could easily be affected by colour variation caused by various environment changes. In our recent paper [9], a Gaussian weighted histogram intersection (GWHI) algorithm has been proposed to facilitate the histogram matching via taking into account matching of both identical colours and similar colours. The weight is determined by the distance between two colours. When applied to number plate categorization, the GWHI algorithm demonstrates to be more robust to colour variations and produces a classification with much lower intra-class distance and much higher interclass distance than previous HI algorithms. However, the processing speed of this GWHI method is still not satisfying. In this paper, the GWHI method is further refined, where a colour quantization method is utilized to reduce the number of colours without introducing apparent perceptual colour distortion. New experimental results demonstrate that using the refined GWHI method, image categorization can be done more efficiently. © 2006 IEEE

Learning-based license plate detection using global and local features

This paper proposes a license plate detection algorithm using both global statistical features and local Haar-like features. Classifiers using global statistical features are constructed firstly through simple learning procedures. Using these classifiers, more than 70% of background area can be excluded from further training or detecting. Then the AdaBoost learning algorithm is used to build up the other classifiers based on selected local Haar-like features. Combining the classifiers using the global features and the local features, we obtain a cascade classifier. The classifiers based on global features decrease the complexity of the system. They are followed by the classifiers based on local Haar-like features, which makes the final classifier invariant to the brightness, color, size and position of license plates. The encouraging detection rate is achieved in the experiments. © 2006 IEEE

Gaussian weighted histogram intersection for license plate classification

The conventional histogram intersection (HI) algorithm computes the intersected section of the corresponding color histograms in order to measure the matching rate between two color images. Since this algorithm is strictly based on the matching between bins of identical colors, the final matching rate can be easily affected by color variation caused by various environment changes. In this paper, a Gaussian weighted histogram intersection (GWHI) algorithm is proposed to facilitate the histogram matching via taking into account matching of both identical and similar colors. The weight is determined by the distance between two colors. The algorithm is applied to license plate classification. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm produces a much lower intra-class distance and a much higher inter-class distance than previous HI algorithms for tested images which are captured under various illumination conditions. © 2006 IEEE

A comparison on histogram based image matching methods

Using colour histogram as a stable representation over change in view has been widely used for object recognition. In this paper, three newly proposed histogram-based methods are compared with other three popular methods, including conventional histogram intersection (HI) method, Wong and Cheung's merged palette histogram matching (MPHM) method, and Gevers' colour ratio gradient (CRG) method. These methods are tested on vehicle number plate images for number plate classification. Experimental results disclose that, the CRG method is the best choice in terms of speed, and the GWHI method can give the best classification results. Overall, the CECH method produces the best performance when both speed and classification performance are concerned. © 2006 IEEE