A New Methodology for License Plate Recognition

Abstract

License plate localization process is carried out by weight based density map method (WBDM). This new approach is capable of recognizing license plates in different conditions and it relaxes some constraints in the conventional methods like the size and colour of the plate, style of the characters, position of the vehicle environment lighting etc. Compared to existing methods, proposed approach gives 98% of matching ratio in different constraints while recognizing the license plate in 19.86 second. It shows this approach is efficient in both space and time, making it suitable for any real time applications. This method can easily be improved to identify multiple number plates in a single image.

Indexing terms:

• Image edge detection
• Image segmentation
• Neural networks
• Machine vision

Additional information

Notes on contributors

R Bremananth

Bremananth R received the BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Madurai Kamaraj and Bharathidsan University, India in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He obtained MPhil degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Bharathiar University. He is currently working towards the PhD degree in Computer Science in the Department of CSE, PSG College of Technology, India.

He is a Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College, Coimbatore. He has 10 years of teaching experience and published several research papers in national and international conferences. His research interests include pattern recognition, computer vision, image processing, biometrics, multimedia and soft computing. He is a member of ISTE, ACS and IETE, India.

Vidya Sudhan L Nathan

Vidya Sudhan L Nathan received the BE degree in CSE from Bharathiar University, India in 2004. He is currently a software engineer Ifosys, Bangalore, India.

Vivek Seetharaman

Vivek Seetharaman received BE degree in CSE from Bharathiar University, India in 2004. He is currently software engineer in Wipro, India.

A Chitra

Chitra A received the PhD and ME degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Bharathiar University, India. She is currently a Professor in the Department of CSE, PSG College of Technology, India. She has 15 years of teaching experience and published several papers in national and international journals and conferences. She is the coordinator of few research projects sponsored by the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, AICTE and VSSC. Her research interests include distributed systems, soft computing, image processing, biometrics, and computer vision. She is a member of ACS and CSI, India.