A real-time license plate recognition system for Saudi Arabia using LabVIEW

License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems play an important role in intelligent transportation applications. These systems have been extensively used in highway and bridge charge, ports, airports, gate monitoring, parking and toll applications, to mention a few. In this paper, we propose a real-time LPR system that uses the LabVIEW software and is based on the NI-Camera Vision System. The system adapts automatically to detect license plates from the GCC countries and identify both English & Arabic letters and Numerals. The system uses recently introduced LPs in Saudi Arabia to test the real-time operation. The system was tested using low-resolution images of just 640×480 pixels and achieved a success rate of 94% under optimal conditions. Most importantly, the processing time is under 40 ms/plate outperforming most existing systems which average around 100 ms/plate.