Image Processing Techniques for Identifying Vehicle License Plate and Traffic Monitoring

While the first industrial automatic systems of Car License Plate Recognition (CLPR) started emerging in 80s, an outburst of commercial systems occurred in 90s, also. Nevertheless that a lot of CLPR systems are available in the market worldwide, the research and development still continues and new sophisticated solutions to plate localization, character segmentation and recognition appear. This is due to the growing demand for the automatic vehicle identification required for traffic control, border control, access-control, calculation of parking time and payment, search for stolen cars or unpaid fees, and the requirement for reliable identification at different lighting conditions, presence of random or structured noise in the plate, and nationality specific features, concerning plate’s size and type of characters. Optical image processing is an advancing field which has received much attention in recent years. Optical techniques have already shown their applicability in target identification, advanced signal processing operations and advanced linear algebra operations. The potential capabilities of processing of data using photons instead of electrons as the carrier of information have established, beyond any doubt, that the optical techniques will be the next generation technology surpassing electronic techniques in some important areas such as air traffic control, missile guidance and remote sensing. Using this optical image processing the vehicle license plate and the traffic monitoring will be identified accurately.