A Review of Automatic License Plate Recognition System in Mobile-based Platform

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) is the process of retrieving license plate information from a captured image or video frames from a sequence of videos. ALPR can assist law enforcement officers to identify stolen vehicles or to capture vehicle information from those that violate traffic laws instantly. It is also commonly used as an electronic payment system for toll payment or parking fee payment. Traditionally, ALPR is installed in a PC-based platform to take advantage of its processing power to process high-quality images captured by high-resolution cameras. Most smartphones nowadays are equipped with a high-quality camera and faster processing system which can be used to develop portable ALPR system. Thus, this has encouraged many researchers to work on implementing ALPR technology for the mobile platform. In this paper, we reviewed several researches that have implemented ALPR in the mobile-based platform. We discuss the techniques used in the three main stages of ALPR namely localisation, segmentation and recognition. The advantages and disadvantages of each technique are summarised in a table