Embedded real-time bilingual ALPR

Author

Ahmed Biyabani, A. ; Al-Salman, Salman A. ; Alkhalaf, Khalaf S.

Author_Institution

CS Dept., Al-Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic Univ., Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

fYear

2015

fDate

17-19 Feb. 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems are useful for various surveillance and security purposes. While ALPR is a mature technology, customization for individual countries plates is ongoing. The utility of such systems may be increased if they provide real-time information and if they can be deployed easily using low-cost embedded hardware. In this paper we describe a FPGA-based real-time ALPR system which may be embedded and which is geared towards plates with either Roman or Arabic characters. We believe it is the first system with this combination of features. We report a modest 84% success rate for our OCR algorithm in field tests and a corresponding hardware response time of 1.3ms reflecting a 200x improvement over software only techniques.

Keywords

embedded systems; field programmable gate arrays; natural language processing; optical character recognition; traffic engineering computing; ALPR systems; Arabic characters; FPGA-based real-time ALPR system; OCR algorithm; Roman characters; automatic license plate recognition systems; embedded real-time bilingual ALPR; hardware response time; individual countries plates customization; low-cost embedded hardware; optical character recognition; security purposes; surveillance purposes; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Image edge detection; Image segmentation; Licenses; Optical character recognition software; Real-time systems; Embedded; Image-processing; Real-time;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communications, Signal Processing, and their Applications (ICCSPA), 2015 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Sharjah

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCSPA.2015.7081311

Filename

7081311