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An efficient method of license plate location. Pattern Recognition Letters 26 (2005) 2431-2438 Journal of Electronic Imaging 11(4), 507-516 (October 2002) . Presented by - Waseem Khatri. Objective :. To efficiently locate a license plate in an image Motivation:
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An efficient method of license plate location Pattern Recognition Letters 26 (2005) 2431-2438 Journal of Electronic Imaging 11(4), 507-516 (October 2002) Presented by - Waseem Khatri
Objective : • To efficiently locate a license plate in an image Motivation: License plate recognition can be an essential tool for • Road traffic monitoring • Automatic payments of tolls on highways & bridges • Parking lot access control • Ticketing speeding vehicles
Algorithm Image Enhancement Vertical Edge Extraction Noise Removal Plate Location License plate Extraction from Original image
Edge Information • Plate area contains rich edge information • Background areas around the plate mainly include horizontal edges • Background areas have long curves and random noises • If only the vertical edges are extracted from the car image and most of the background is removed, the plate area can be isolated
Image Enhancement • The input image is converted to a gray scale image of size 384 X 288 • Gradients in the image due to improper lighting conditions • Few vertical edges in the plate area • Enhancement is necessary • Calculate the luminance and variance of each pixel • Bilinear Interpolation Enhancement Coefficient 8 X 8 Blocks
Edge Extraction and Noise Removal • Vertical edge extraction using Sobel Operator • Thresholding • Background curve and noise removal is done using the Concerned Neighborhood Pixel (CNP) Algorithm • CNP checks all pixels around the concerned pixel and decides if it’s a randam noise pixel or a genuine edge pixel
License plate search • A window of size (H X W) is passed through the CNP output image • Total number of edge points in the window are counted • Candidates are selected if they are above a certain threshold • Maximum value among the candidates is considered as a final result • The co-ordinates are noted and the plate is extracted from the orignal image
System Application Enhancement BLI Vertical Edge Extraction Noise Removal CNP Plate Location Image Output System Affine Transformation Character Extraction (Segmentation) Classifier Hotelling Transform Blob Coloring Bayesian Fisher Neural Nets
Conclusion Advantages • Higher recognition rate compared to other methods like Line sensitive filters (Luis et al., 1999), Row-wise & Column-wise DFT’s (Parisi et al., 1998), Edge image improvement method (Ming et al., 1996) Drawbacks • Slower than other four methods • Calculated values of luminance and variance using Bilinear Interpolation are not actual values • Image size is fixed 288 X 384 • Window size of the license plate search is fixed • Bilinear Interpolation is the most computationally intensive procedure in the given algorithm