Optical Character Recognition Improvement for License Plate Recognition in Indonesia

Automatic license plate recognition is useful in a lot of applications. There are a lot of methods used for that purpose and one of which is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR in this paper is used to recognize optically processed printed character in license plate number which is based on template matching. Jaccard similarity index is used to measure the similarity between the actual and detected license number. We found some factors that affect the effectiveness of template matching based Optical Character Recognition in recognizing the license plate number. Those factors are font type, template resolution, noise, tilting and the painting. We have done some improvement for the Indonesian condition by using a more relevant font type, construction a new template with higher resolution, and removing more noise. The result is the increase of average Jaccard similarity by 21,67 percent and the reduced of number of noise detected by 99,04 percent.