An accurate method for license plate localization using morphological operations and edge processing

Various license plate localization techniques have been developed in the past with variable results. In this paper, we implement a localization method keeping in mind Indian vehicle license plate specifications. The proposed algorithm makes use of morphological operations like reconstruction, dilation, erosion and exploits license plate edge characteristics. We also make use of color segmentation in the YCbCr color space for special license plates. Skewed plates are corrected by applying Harris corner detection. After conducting tests on a wide range of images with variable illumination & arbitrary camera angles, the success rate of our algorithm was found to be 96.88%.