Segmenting characters from license plate images with little prior knowledge

In this paper, to enable a fast and robust system for automatically recognizing license plates with various appearances, new and simple but efficient algorithms are developed to segment characters from extracted license plate images. Our goal is to segment characters properly from a license plate image region. Different from existing methods for segmenting degraded machine-printed characters, our algorithms are based on very weak assumptions and use no prior knowledge about the format of the plates, in order for them to be applicable to wider applications. Experimental results demonstrate promising efficiency and flexibility of the proposed scheme. © 2010 IEEE