Vehicle Number Plate Detection

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
In the current information technology era, the use of automations and intelligent systems is becoming more and more widespread. The Intelligent Transport System (ITS) technology has gotten so much attention that many systems are being developed and applied all over the world. Vehicle number plate recognition has turned out to be an important research issue. VNPR has many applications in traffic monitoring system, including controlling the traffic volume, ticketing vehicle without the human control, vehicle tracking, policing, security, and so on. The most vital and the most difficult part of any VNPR system is the detection and extraction of the vehicle Number plate, which directly affects the systems overall accuracy. The presence of noise, blurring in the image, uneven illumination, dim light and foggy conditions make the task even more difficult. In this paper we propose a detailed and novel method for accurately detecting the location of vehicle number plates and recognizing the numerals and characters in it. The proposed system can work very accurately for cars in almost any environment, time of day, and conditions.

1.2 Related Work

The problem of automatic VNP recognition is being studied since the 90s. The early approaches were based on characteristics of boundary lines. The input image being first processed to enrich and enhance boundary line-information by using algorithms such as the gradient filter, and resulting in an image formed of edges. The image thus processed was converted to its binary counterpart and then processed by certain algorithms, such as Hough transform, to detect lines. Eventually, couples of 2-parallel lines were considered as a platedesignate . Another approach was based on the morphology of objects in an image . This approach focuses on some salient properties of vehicle plate images such as their brightness, contrast, symmetry, angles, etc. Due to these features, this method could be used to detect the similar properties in a certain image and locate the position of number plate regions.

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The third approach was based on statistical properties of text . In this approach, text regions were discovered using statistical properties of text like the variance of gray level, number of edges, edge densities in the region, etc. This approach was commonly used in finding text in images, and could well be used for discovering and designating candidate number plate areas as they include alphabets and numerals.

In addition, there have been a number of other methods relating to this problem focusing on detecting VNP using artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms . These systems used edge detection and edge statistics and then AI techniques to detect the location of the number plate-designate area. All of the systems discussed above have some kind of limitations for example they are plate size dependent, colour dependent, work only in certain conditions or environment like indoor images etc. The method that we are proposing is independent of color, size, location and angle of the number plate of the vehicle.

1.3 Proposed System

Fig: 1 shows the Diagram of the proposed VNPR Process.

fig. 1: Proposed VNPR Process Input of this system is the image captured by a camera placed at a distance of 4-5metres away from the vehicle as shown in Fig 2.

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Fig. 2: Original image for recognition

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Overview
To add to the evidence-base of license plate recognition technologies, we begin with a national survey of LPR use in the United States. We randomly sampled law enforcement agencies to determine their use, concerns, and challenges in using LPR. We also explore both issues of effectiveness of LPR as a crime control intervention and the potential effects of LPR on police legitimacy and legal concerns. This survey is the first random sample national survey of agencies to gauge these issues.

2.2 Plate Region Confirmation

We observed that there were many horizontal and vertical lines which are present intheresultant combined image and which could possibly bring some error in the final results. Soto remove those horizontal lines we opened the image with a horizontal line shaped structuring element and subtracted that image from the intersected image. This considerably removed some false designate areas such as the bumper lines or the horizontal lines of the front or rear lights. After that we dilated the image with a rectangular structuring element so as to combine the objects on the number plate into one object.

2.3 Project Background

Vehicle License Plate Recognition is an image processing system whereby it is used to recognize the vehicles by identifying the license plate. It is basically use for traffic and security purposes.

2.4 How the Vehicle License Plate System works

Firstly, the vehicle will stop at the car gantry. The cycle will start when the vehicle steps over the detector. It will activate a signal to the Vehicle License Plate System of the presence of the vehicle.

Secondly, illumination (infra-red) will be activated and images of the front picture of the vehicle will be taken. The system will read the information pixels of the vehicle and run the recognition process.
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Thirdly, the system will apply certain algorithm to analyses the vehicle image. Besides analyzing, the images will be enhance, locating the vehicle plate position and extractthecharacters from the vehicle plate. Next, the characters will be recognized by using Neural Network Lastly, the system will try to match the recognized vehicle plate number with the car plate database. If Access Granted, the gantry will open and allowed the vehicle to passthrough.Diagram is illustrate in Fig 1

Besides, the Vehicle License Plate Recognition also provides an advantage by keepingtheimage of the vehicle in which it will be useful for crime fighting. Camera can also focus on the face of the driver and save it for security reason. There are difficulties for Vehicle License Plate Recognition in which it will affect the efficiency and accuracy of the system. It is essential and important to determine the facts which will able to influence the operations and recognition proficiency. Next, we also need to look into other facts of variables that are not constant. Below are the non-constant variables which will affect the accuracy of recognition:

Speed of the vehicle Weather condition Type of Vehicle Distance between vehicle license plate and the camera Type of plate (Rectangular, Bent type) Vehicle license plate orientation Type of vehicle fonts character

2.5 Various Type Of Vehicle License Plate 2.5.1 What is Car license Plate?
Car license Plate is a rectangular metal plate which consists of a combination sequence of alphabet characters and numbers issued by the government for identification purpose of registered vehicle.
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2.5.2 Private Vehicles
Vehicle owner who register the car as private vehicle are allow to choose the white one in the front plate and yellow in the back plate .Alternatively, they can choose black Number plate on both sides too.

2.5.3 Various type of Registration Numbers

There are a variety of registration numbers that start with specific letter. The type of class series are shown below: A series: Motorcycles CB series: Company / school buses F series: Motorcycles FB series: Motorcycles G series: Goods vehicles P series: Private buses Q series: Company vehicles SH series: Cab/Taxi W series: Heavy vehicles X series: Heavy vehicles Y series: Heavy vehicles

2.5.4 Off-peak Vehicles or Weekend Car

Off-peak Vehicles is also known as Weekend Cars. Vehicle registered under this Series will pay cheaper road tax compared to other series of vehicle. The displayed License plates contain red background with white characters and numberings. The Operation hours for Weekend Cars in Singapore is (7pm to 7am) on weekdays; after 3 pm on Saturday; full day on public holiday and Sunday

2.6 Different type of characters design for various car plates

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Fig. 3

2.7 INTRODUCTION TO MATLAB

MATLAB is chosen as the main development for the license plate recognition application. The task is to construct the algorithm and recognizes can be done using MATLAB. Besides, MATLAB is also very efficient as it have built-in-function tools for neural network and image processing. The advantages of MATLAB can be classified as follows: Platform independence, predefined function and device-independent plotting, Graphical User interface and MATLAB compiler. Comparison of MATLAB with other program is shown in the below diagram.

2.7 Comparison Between MATLAB and Artificial Intelligence

Advantage of Artificial Intelligence: 1. Good for solving complex problems where humans or programmer have expert knowledge in it.
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2. Non-programmers can easily understand the rules of artificial intelligence. 3. We can changed and add individual rules

Disadvantage of Artificial Intelligence: 1. There are difficulty in getting expert knowledge and putting it in used in the system. 2. Not good in common sense reasoning 3. Expensive 4. Slow response 5. Unpredictable Advantage of MATLAB 1. Data can be represented in terms of matrices or vectors. 2. MATLAB coding is shorter and simpler 3. Algorithm used in MATLAB can be converted to use in hardware. 4. The system will perform faster when using Matrix Approach. 5. MATLAB possess power graphic visualization tools.

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CHAPTER 3
OBJECTIVE AND SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
3.1 Objective
The overall objective of the project is to develop a system to recognize vehicle license plate from a car at a gate entrance of a parking lot. The software could lead to a cheaper and faster way of enhancing and determined the performance of the recognition system. The system will be based on a Personal Computer such that it will generate report on the vehicle license plate it has captured. Once the vehicle license plate is captured, the characters will be recognized and displayed on the Graphical User Interface. Besides, the system can also serve as a security purpose whereby it can spot on any wanted or stolen vehicles. In the past, there has been similar project implemented but had poor accuracy. Thus, we would need to improve or rewrite the algorithm to improve the accuracy. I will address a set of constraints and focus on the design of the algorithm to extract the vehicle license plate in order to improve the accuracy. There is definitely a lot more room for further improvement on this project. However, due to the limited time frame given, it is not advisable for me to cover all aspects in this project. Thus, in discussion with my tutor, we managed to come up with the progress guideline as to what need to be included in this

3.2 Scope of the project

VNPD systems may also be used for/by:

Section control, to measure average vehicle speed over longer distances. Border crossings Automobile repossessions Petrol station to log when a motorist drives away without paying for their fuel. A marketing tool to log patterns of use Targeted advertising, a-la minority report-style billboards. Traffic management systems, which determine traffic flow using the time it takes vehicles to pass two VNPD sites

Analyses of travel behaviour (route choice, origin-destination etc.) for transport planning purposes

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Drive through Customer Recognition, to automatically recognize customers based on their license plate and offer them the items they ordered the last time they used the service, improving service to the customer.

To assist visitor management systems in recognizing guest vehicles. Police and Auxiliary Police Car parking companies. Hotels.

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CHAPTER 4
METHODOLOGY
4.1 Pre-processing
The RGB image is then converted into a gray scale image for easy analysis as it consists of only two colour channels. Median filtering is then implemented for the effective removal of speckle noise, salt a pepper noise (impulsive noise).

4.2 Plate Region Extraction

Morphological-dilation operation with rectangular structuring element (SE) of sixe 3X3 is then performed on the binary image. Dilation is a morphological transformation that combines two sets by using vector addition of set SEs, and Erosion can be obtained by dilating the complement of the black pixels and the taking the complement of the resulting point set. Let B denote an SE which is a 3x3 square. The dilation of the image A using the SE B result in another binary image z which is defined as (1).

Similarly, the erosion of the image A by SE B is the binary image z defined by (2).Suppression of structures that are lighter than their surroundings and that are connected to the image border was performed. The area of each of the rectangle is then calculated. From the experiments conducted with large number of real scene images it was observed that the region representing the number plate is of larger area in majority of the images. Therefore the rectangle which is of maximum size is selected. Morphological-erosion operation with rectangular structuring element of sixe 10X5 was then performed.

In erosion, every object pixel that is touching a background pixel is changed into a background pixel. It makes the objects smaller. By subtracting the original image from the eroded image, the number plate would be extracted as there is a large difference between the two images.

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Fig. 4: Result of Morphological Fig. 5 : Result of Morphological Fig. 6:Result of Dilation Erosion with a Bounding box subtraction

4.3 Image Acquisition

The initial phase of image processing for Vehicle License Plate Recognition is to obtain images of vehicles. Electronic devices such as optical (digital/video) camera, webcam etc can be used to capture the acquired images. For this project, vehicle images will be taken with a Panasonic FX 30 digital camera. The images will be stored as color JPEG format on the camera. Next, we might proceed in using the Matlab function to convert the vehicle JPEG image into gray scale format.

4.4 Image Cropping

Image cropping is a recognition process whereby it will extract the smallest rectangle which will contains the edge of the license plate and license plate itself. As the license plate surrounding is of no importance, this cropping process will highly increase the speed of image processing. The figure below shows the copping of image:

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Original Figure

Fig 7 Cropped Figure

4.5 Conversion of RGB Images to Binary Images

In order facilitate the next process smoothly and reducing the processing time, the Image obtain is being converted to Binary Image. The conversion is done by using the Toolbox in MATLAB (im2bw).

4.6 IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

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The aim of this process is to increase and improve the visibility of the image. Image Enhancement techniques consists process of sharpening the edges image, contrast manipulation, reducing noise, colour image processing and image segmentation as well.The process can fall into two categories: Histogram Processing and Spatial domain.

4.7 Segmentation of Individual Characters in the Number Plate

The character segmentation acts as a bridge between the number plate extraction and optical character recognition modules. Its main function is to segment the characters on the chosen candidate region(number plate) such that each character can be sent to the optical character recognition module individually for recognition. This was achieved by the application of the edge operators and by the relaxation labelling approach.Four edge detection methods were used for comparison. They are 1. Canny Edge Detection 2. Sober Edge Detection 3. Prewitt edge detection.
4. Log edge detection

(a)

Canny

(b) Sobel

(C) Prewitt (d) LOG F ig. 8: Result of application of the four different edge detectors

4.8 Character Recognition

It is employed for the purpose of conversion of images of text into characters. OCR Software and ICR Software technology are analytical artificial intelligence systems that consider sequences of characters rather than whole words or phrases. Based on the analysis of sequential lines and curves, OCR and ICR make 'best guesses' at characters using database look-up tables to closely associate or match the strings of characters that form words.

The number plates may be bent and/or tilted with respect to the camera; characters extracted from such number plates may be deformed. Furthermore, input characters may be noisy,
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broken or incomplete. Character recognition techniques should be able to tolerate these defects. We developed our own character templates to suit our particular application which are shown in Fig 8. The topological features of the input character are computed and are compared with those of presto red character templates. The character templateThat best matches the input characters are then displayed.

Fig.9 : OCR templates used for character recognition.

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CHAPTER 5
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
5.1 Results and Discussion
Figure 1 presents sample results of the plate finder algorithm. In the diagrams, the candidate plate regions are outlined with rectangles. The best candidate plate region is outlined with a broad rectangle, while the other rectangles represent alternative candidates. Illustrates

successful identification of the plate. In figure 3, four non-plate regions have been identified as candidate plate regions because of their. Correct reading result.

Figure 4 shows the greyscale images of the extracted glyphs, with the neural network scores and the recognised characters displayed beneath each gray scale glyph image. Non-text glyphs are denotes by an asterisk (*). They are ignored in the final recognition result.

Figure 5 demonstrates successful recognition of a number plate where the characters are visually merged with the frame. In the original segmentation, shown in figure 5, the black frame connects to all the letters, producing a large segmentation region in which the individual glyphs cannot be identified. The frame removal algorithm identifies horizontal cut lines that provide the best segmentation of the single region into multiple regions, and crops the segmented image above and below to separate the glyph blobs from the frame.

The resulting segmentation, shown in figure 6 has one connected region for each glyph. A portion of the vertical edge of the frame also remains as a segmented region. Clustering of glyph rectangles, shown in figure 5, identifies the individual letters along with the cluster of blobs that represent the state NSW and the vertical edge of the frame. The neural network OCR, shown in figure 11, assigns very low scores to the frame portion and the state, while successfully recognising the plate letters.

In figure 3, the plastic frame around the number plate is badly positioned and overlays the digit 9. The segmentation, in figure 6, shows the digit 9 connected to the frame which forms a large segmentation region. The fact that Australian number plates exhibit regular glyph spacing and consistent glyph dimensions allows the glyph rectangles in figure 6 to correctly localise the digit 9 so that the number plate can be successfully read.
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Figure 9 demonstrates recognition of the number plate with white text. In this particular example, the that intrudes into the text area. Figure 9 demonstrates successful processing of a number plate where damage has created a distracting mark and wear and tear has faded the lettering. Even in this situation, the segmentation quality is excellent and the OCR neural network recognises the plate characters with a score of 0.95. Demonstrates successfully handling a P plate while figure 10 demonstrates that plates can be read even if they do not have a clearly visible outline. These results demonstrate the ability of our methods to perform well under challenging conditions.

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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSSION
CONCLUSION
A lot of research has been performed on detection and recognition of license plate. Different researchers provided different methods and techniques for this process. However, every technique has its own advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore each country has its own license plate numbering system, colours, language of characters, style (font) and sizes. Even within the same country the license plate differs from state to state and in terms of types of License plate.

However, desirable work for Indian license plate detection and recognition could not get required attention in the literature. It is mainly due to the reason of different style of Indian license plates. Although some researchers have been performed on Indian LP detection and recognition, but this research is different from the previous works because Indian license plate use English numbers with Arial black characters written on it and because of the complex font of the text on its plate Saudi Arial black vehicle plate identification Presents a critical issue due its unique nature.

The proposed approach has been tested on 200 front images of national license plate of Indian. A higher percentage of accuracy has been obtained to show that the significant of this approach. The study could be further investigated on other Middle East countries.

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Vehicle Number Plate Detection REFERENCE

[1] G.Adorni, F. Bergenti and S. Cagnoni, Vehicle License Plate Recognition by means of Cellular Automata, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Vehicles, pp 689-693, 1998.

[2] J.F. Alves, C.C. Reinhart and J.F. Frazier, Automated License Plate Locator and Reader, Patent CA2135240, 1995.

[3] C.I. Attwood, Vehicle Licence Plate Recognition, Patent GB2344204, 2000.

[4] H. L. Bai, C. P. Liu, A Hybrid License Plate Extraction Method Based on Edge Statistics and Morphology, Proceedings of the 17 Recognition, 2004.
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International Conference on Pattern

[5] C. M. Bishop, Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

[6] L. De Vena, Number Plate Recognition by Hierarchical Neural Networks, Proceedings International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, vol 3, pp 2105-2108, 1993. [7] L. Eikvil and R.B Huseby, Traffic Surveillance in Real- Time Using Hidden Markov Models, Proceedings 12th Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, Bergen, 2001.

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