Vehicle license plate detection in images

Frequently, there is a need to identify vehicle license plates (VLP) in images taken from a camera that is far away from the vehicle for security. The extracted information from vehicle license plates is used for enforcement, access-control, and flow management, e.g. to keep a time record for automatic payment calculations or to fight against crime. That´s make license plates detection crucial and inevitable in the vehicle license plate recognition system. This paper aims to present a new robust method to detect and localize license plates in images. Especially we focus on the Moroccan´s VLP. The proposed approach is based on edge features and characteristics of license plate´s characters. Various images including Moroccan´s VLP taken from different distances and under different angles were used to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results show that our system can efficiently detect and localize the Moroccan´s VLP in the images. Indeed, the recall/precision curve of the proposed method proves that 95% precision rate is obtained for recall rate value equals to 81%. In addition, the standard measure of quality is equal to 87.44 %.