License plate localization and recognition in camera pictures

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to license plate localization and recognition. A proposed method is designed to perform recognition of any kind of license plates under any environmental conditions. The main assumption of this method is the ability of recognition of all license plates which can be found in an individual picture. To solve the problem of localization of a license plate two independent methods are used. The first one was based on the connected components analysis and the second one searches for the “signature” of the license plate at the image. Segmentation of characters is performed by using vertical projection of license plate’s image. However, a simple neural network is used to recognize them. Finally, to separate correct license plates from other captions in the picture, during the license plate recognition process, a syntax analysis is used. The proposed approach is discussed together with results obtained on a benchmark data set of license plate pictures. In this paper examples of correct and incorrect results are also presented, as well as possible practical applications of proposed method.