Number plate reading using computer vision

The main tasks of a number plate recognition system are the location of the number plate area in the image, the segmentation of the characters and their identification. These tasks are strongly inter-related, mainly because the way to check if the number plate has been correctly located is based on the result of the character identification process (it should correspond to a predefined syntax). Algorithmic improvements to previous versions of the system, based on the results of intensive testing, are described in this paper. For the location of the number plate area in the image, a new line-based method has been developed. The method, instead of looking for character like shapes in the image, takes advantage of the “signature” of the number plate area in a horizontal cross-section of the image. The method used for the segmentation of the characters is derived from a technique first proposed by Lu (1995). The identification of the characters uses the OCR engine developed by Barroso et al. (1995), based on the critical points method