Computer Vision Assignment - License Plate Recognition
TI2716-B
Introduction
With this poster we would like to inform you about the progress we have made
during the first sprint. Our aim is to make an application that recognizes license
plates. To do this it is necessary to only focus on the license plate in an image.
Subsequently, you can start performing character recognition on the plate. Then
you can return the string of the license plate with the associated frame number
and timestamp. Our focus of this week was to recognize Dutch license plates
on non-moving cars and to label all the characters on the license plates.
GUI
To show the results of our license plate recognition application we have build
a GUI containing the following aspects. Our GUI, shown in figure 1, consists of
an axis graph that shows the original video of the cars, an axis to show the fil-
tered license plate of the showed frame, a table to store the results and buttons
to start/stop/restart the video. The table will contain a string of the characters
found in the license plate, the frame number and its timestamp. The style we
have chosen for the GUI is traffic lights. This explains the colors green, red and
orange for the buttons. We decided on this theme, because it is applicable for
our application.
Currently our license plate recognition program cannot yet turn the characters
into text.
Figure 1: The design of the GUI
Week 1
2 steps:
3 4) Use the bpropagation function to remove all edge objects in the
1 4
5 pare the three colour channels (RGB) of the video frame. The result is shown
To do
Performing the steps given in the segmentation
section currently gives a decent result. Most li-
cense plates in the categories 1 and 2 return
an image similar to image 5 above.
However it does not work on every car. In
two cases we have found that one character is
attached to an edge object. It then gets re-
moved during step 4 of the segmentation.
Figure 3: License plate that removes a character
It also does not yet work on frames that con-
tain 2 license plates. Our code currently crops
a frame when it detects a license plate. It does
not yet crop it twice for each license plate in
the frame.
Foreign license plates are also not recog-
nized yet. Currently we look at yellow license
plates only.
Segmentation
In order to recognize various license plates, we have applied the following
1) Use a threshold to seperate the license plate from the background.
2) Crop the original image to only show the license plate.
3) Use a threshold to seperate the characters from the background.
binary image.
5) Label the characters in the license plate using the label function.
So to seperate the license plate from the background we used multiple
thresholds. First we took three colour samples from the video containing the
yellow color of the license plate. Then we created three scatter plots to com-
in figure 2.
Figure 2: Three scatter plots comparing red-blue (top-left), red-green (top-right)
and blue-green (bottom-left)
After applying the thresholds, we used various binary functions to select the li-
cense plate and remove all other objects in the binary image (image 1).
Next we used the imcrop function provided by Matlab to cut out the license
plate (image 2). In order to recognize the characters in the license plate we
made use of another threshold. This time we used the threshold calculation
algorithm provided by the slides from the course. We applied this to the green
colour channel as this seems to give the best result (image 3).
Next we needed to remove all other objects from the binary image. We did
this by subtracting the output-image of the bpropagation function from
image 3. This operation removes all edge objects from the binary image
(image 4).
Finally we labelled all characters by using the label function (image 5).
For the next sprint we will focus on recognizing the different characters and
store them in a String.
Zo van Steijn & Emma Jimmink - Group 9