Malaysian Vehicle License Plate Recognition

Othman Khalifa, Sheroz Khan, Rafiqul Islam, and Ahmad Suleiman

Kulliyyah of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia

Abstract: Vehicle license plate recognition is an image-processing technology used to identify vehicles by their license plates. This technology can be used in various security and traffic applications, such as finding stolen cars, controlling access to car parks and gathering traffic flow statistics. In this paper an approach to license plate localization and recognition is presented. A proposed method to perform recognition of license plates under any environmental conditions, with no assumptions about the orientation of the plate or its distance from the camera is designed. To solve the problem of localization of a license plate, a simple texture-based approach based on edge information is used. Segmentation of characters is performed by using connected components analysis on license plate’s image, and a simple multi-layer Perceptron neural network is used to recognize them. Simulation results were shown to be an efficient method for real time plate recognition.

Keywords: LPR, license plate, license plate recognition, OCR.

Received March 14, 2006; accepted July 13, 2006