A recognition of vehicle license plate using a genetic algorithm based segmentation

Extracting a license plate is an important stage in automatic vehicle identification. It is very difficult because vehicle images are usually degraded and processing the images is computationally intensive. We propose a new method to extract the plate region using a distributed genetic algorithm. The algorithm offers robustness in dealing with deformation of vehicle images and inherent parallelism to improve the processing time. A test with seventy images shows an extraction rate of 92.8%, working well within real world situations. This results suggest that the proposed method is pertinent to be put into practical use