Automatic License Plate Recognition System for Indian Vehicles in Different Environment

A License Plate Recognition (LPR) System is one type of Intelligent Transport systems and is of significant interest because of its potential applications to areas such as highway electronic toll collection, Traffic Monitoring System, speed control, automobile theft prevention, parking lot management, and many other areas. This research work proposes an automatic license plate recognition system for Indian license plates. The system captures the images of the vehicles with a digital camera. An algorithm for the extraction of license plate and an algorithm for segmentation of characters have been designed. A new method is adopted in this work to analyze road images which often contain vehicles and extract LP from natural properties by finding vertical and horizontal edges from vehicle region. Character segmentation is an important step in License Plate Recognition system. There are many difficulties in this step, such as the influence of image noise, plate frame, rivet, the space mark, and so on. This work presents a new algorithm for character segmentation, clustering is used to segments all the numbers of the LP. Eight-Neighbor algorithm is used for the purpose of number segmentation and the prior knowledge in horizontal and vertical segmentation respectively. In this work, character recognition is done by using pattern matching based upon the height and width of the character an algorithm for character recognition is proposed. The performance of the system has been investigated on real images of vehicles captured under various illumination conditions.