A feature based approach for localization of Indian number plates

Automatic number plate recognition is a real time embedded system which automatically recognizes the license number of vehicles. Such systems require the localization of number plate area in order to identify the characters present on it. This paper presents a feature based methodology for localization of Indian number plates. Since number plate standards are not strictly practiced in India, a large amount of variations are obtained in parameters like, size of number plate and characters, location of number plate, type of font used, background and foreground color, etc. which makes the task of number plate localization all the more difficult. A two-step approach for localization is presented. In the first step, the features of characters are used to find the probable characters locations. In the second step, the features of number plates are used to find the probable number plate locations. This approach enables the localization of number plates in widely varying illumination conditions with relevance to the commonly found types of Indian number plates with a success rate of 87%.