A license plate localization using morphology and recognition

Locating the car license plate in an image a car is an important step in car license plate recognition/identification applications. This problem poses many challenges like location of license plate from images taken in poor illumination and bad weather condition; plates that are partly obscured by dirt and images that have low contrast. This paper presents a morphology based method for license plate extraction from car images followed by the segmentation of characters and reorganization. This algorithm uses morphological operations on the preprocessed, edge images of the vehicles. Characteristic features such as license plate width and height, character height and spacing are considered for defining structural elements for morphological operations. The recognition of the contents of the license plate is performed using cross correlation followed by neural network. The experimental results with a reasonably large set of car images are very encouraging.