A Morphology Based Approach for Car License Plate Extraction

Locating the car license plate in an image or video frame of 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 new morphology based method for license plate extraction from car images. The 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. Connected component analysis is used to select the band containing license plate from the candidate segmented. The experimental results with a reasonably large set of car images are very encouraging.