Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Advisor:
Dr. Mohamed Deriche
13/2/2012
Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 4
2.
Background .......................................................................................................................... 5
3.
3.2.1 Preprocessing........................................................................................................... 11
3.2.2 Character Segmentation & Recognition ............................................................ 12
4.
Results ................................................................................................................................. 15
5.
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 16
References ................................................................................................................................... 17
ListofFigures
Figure 1: A typical Saudi Arabian license plate .................................................................... 5
Figure 2: Localization phase block diagrams......................................................................... 7
Figure 3: Original acquired image and its masked greyscale image ................................. 8
Figure 4: Result of : a) Background Correction Local Threshold ..................................... 8
Figure 5: Result of Particle Filter and Centroid .................................................................... 9
Figure 6: LabVIEW block diagrams generated form Vision Assistant that gives License
Plate Center .................................................................................................................................. 10
Figure 7: processing the image before the OCR phase ...................................................... 11
Figure 8: Results of: a) Niblack Local Threshold,
b) Remove Border Objects
c) Dilation,
d) Gaussian filter & Remove Small Objects ..................... 12
Figure 9: The OCR Training Session ................................................................................... 12
Figure 10: Complete Representation of Center, Masking operation and the OCR block
diagrams of LabView ................................................................................................................ 13
Figure 11 : User interface showing final results during the day and night .................... 14
1.
Introduction
most
existing
systems
exhibit
complex
high
computational load, making them inefficient and slow. Other systems use
cloud computing in order to process the images. Using slow and
complicated systems can increase the operational costs of such systems
greatly.
This brings up the need for efficient and powerful digital image
processing techniques and algorithms to be developed.
Numerous approaches to LPR have been proposed in the literature.
However, only a few papers have studied the performance of a real-time
LPR system, and even fewer papers study the recognition of bilingual
license plates such as most GCC license plates. In addition, existing
commercial systems that are able to recognize Saudi or GCC license
plates are proprietary. Thus, small businesses and individuals are unable
to access this technology.
It is important that an open-source, fast, and efficient system be
developed to recognize Saudi license plates.
In this work we approach the problem of real-time LPR by utilizing
the NI LabVIEW software. Our method has proven to be surprisingly fast
compared to other systems, with an average processing speed
2.
Background
The processing speed depends on the specifications of the PC running the software. The
specifications under which these results were found are shown in the results section.
3.
Proposed System
Each block diagram has a specific task and they are cascaded to
produce the license plates center coordinates. First, the block Image
Mask 1, is used to discard the borders of the image that are statistically
unlikely to contain the license plate, it is assumed the license plate is not
on the border of the image. This is done to speed up the overall
processing of the image. Next, Color Plane Extraction 1 is used to
convert the image into a gray-scale one (see figure 3).
To make the design easy, these processes were designed using NI Vision Assistant, and later
transferred to LabVIEW.
a)
Next, particle filter 1 is used to eliminate any objects that have very
small or very large areas compared to the license plate. This usually
removes all objects in the image except the license plate. Finally, the
8
Figure 6: LabVIEW block diagrams that determines the license plates center
10
The masked image is passed through the set of processes, shown in figure
7, to prepare it for the segmentation and OCR phase. We call this
preprocessing.
11
a)
b)
d)
c)
The OCR tool extracts unique features from each segmented object in the
image and compares them to each character stored in the character set. It
then returns the closest character from the character set that best matches
the object and returns a nonzero classification score. The character would
be accepted if its value is higher than the acceptance level [6]. LabVIEW
12
block diagrams that were utilized to perform the previous processes are
shown in figure 10.
13
Figure 11 : User interface showing final results during the day and night
14
4.
Results
The images used to test the system are all of size 640x480 pixels, and
it is assumed that the license plate is clean, and that the lighting
conditions are good. A sample of 112 images has been used to test the
system. Of these images, 95 where successfully located. This amounts to
a localization success rate 84.8%.
Of the 95 successfully located plates, 94 plates were recognized
correctly. A plate is said to be unsuccessfully recognized if at least one of
its characters was not recognized correctly. Therefore, the success rate for
the recognition with our set of 95 images reached 99%. Combining this
rate with the localization success rate, the overall success rate is around
84%.
It is important to note that we used a set of images to train the
recognition system. Each character was trained 8 times, on average.
Our testing was done on an Intel Xeon CPU running at 2.67 GHz with
4 GB of RAM. Our results show a very fast recognition speed (an
average of 38 ms/plate) which has proven to be much faster than the
results mentioned in table 1.
Table 1: Summary Of Final Results
System
Localization
Success Rate
Recognition
Success Rate
Overall
Success Rate
Average Speed
(s/image)3
Proposed
85%
99%
84%
0.038
[4]
N/A
93%
N/A
0.089
[7]
91.7%
90.9%
83%
1.1
[8]
95.6%
93.7%
87%
N/A
3
The processing speed depends heavily on the system used to run the testing. The numbers mentioned
here are based on different systems. They are mentioned to give an idea about the relative speeds, not
for the sake of comparison.
15
5.
Conclusion
16
References
[1] H. Chen, J. Ren, H. Tan and J. Wang, "A Novel Method for License Plate
Localization," in Fourth International Conference on Image and Graphics, 2007.
[2] X.-F. Chen, B.-C. Pan and S.-L. Zheng, "A License Plate Localization Mehtod Based
on Region Narrowing," in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Machine
Learning and Cybernetics, Kunming, 2008.
[3] F. Faradji, A. H. Rezaie and M. Ziaratban, "A Morphological Based License Plate
Location," in IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, San Antonio, 2007.
[4] S. Lu, Z. Liu, Y. Chen and L. Liu, "AWHD for License Plate Character," in ICESS,
2008.
[5] L. Liying and Z. Xiaofang, "Application of Phase Correlation Algorithm in Vehicle
License Plate," in ICICTA, 2008.
[6] National Instruments, "NI Vision 2010 Concepts Help," June 2010. [Online].
Available: http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/372916J-01/.
[7] P. Comelli, P. Ferragina, M. N. Granieri and F. Stablie, "Optical recognition of motor
vehicle license plates," IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 790-799, 1995.
[8] H. A. Hegt, R. J. Dela Haye and N. A. Khan, "A high performance license plate
recognition system," IEEE Int. Conf. Syst. Man. Cybern., vol. 5, pp. 4357-4362, 1998.
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