License Plate Recognition: A Brief Tutorial

Abstract

With the rapid development of public transportation system, automatic identification of vehicles become more and more practical in many applications during the past two decades. Nowadays, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are having a wide impact in people?s life as their scope is to improve transportation safety and mobility and to enhance productivity through the use of advanced technologies. ITS are divided into intelligent infrastructure systems and intelligent vehicle systems. A computer vision and character recognition algorithm for license plate recognition can be used as a core for intelligent infrastructure like electronic payment systems (toll payment, parking fee payment), freeway and arterial management systems for traffic surveillance. Moreover, as increased security awareness has made the need for vehicle based authentication technologies extremely significant the proposed system may be employed as access control system for monitoring of unauthorized vehicles entering private areas.