On the Enhancement and Binarization of Mobile Captured Vehicle Identification Number for an Embedded Solution

An embedded solution for automatic detection of Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) captured by a mobile camera has a number of real world applications. But the performance of available open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems on VIN images captured by mobile phones is extremely poor because of the image quality affected by various noises. In a recent study of such images, we have observed that the performance of existing open source OCR systems can be improved by applying several image enhancement techniques on these images before sending them to the OCR engine. In this article, we have presented such a method that improves the recognition accuracy from 5.89% up to 82.3%.