FPGA-Based Real Time License Plate Localization System

[[abstract]]The study of license plate recognition (LPR) has been developed for over the decade of years. There were also plenty of contributions by this area of research. However, LPR is not the universal system in human daily life. The reason is that image processing costs large amount of computation by personal computer so that license plate does not preciously and slowly locate. If license plate location can be implemented by hardware, it will enhance the performance, speed, preciseness and reliability for the use of the system of intelligence transportation. The thesis proposed an approach of license plate location implemented by hardware in order to improve the speed of operation. In section of license plate location, using the color attribute of license plate is to be the feature for detecting four kinds of license plate in Taiwan, that is to eliminate the edge which is not belong to the color of license plate by color edge detection. Because the remained license- plate edges are almost closed to each other, the approach of morphology using closing, opening and dilation respectively can connect those edges to be a bigger region and remove the noise out simultaneously. After binarization, applying connect component labeling is to assign the unique number to each region. The size filter and aspect ratio can seize the location of license plate. In experimental results, the execution time of one color image is about 6.543ms by FPGA architecture, Color edge detection