Accuracy enhancement for license plate recognition

Automatic License Plate Recognition is useful for real time traffic management and surveillance. License plate recognition usually contains two steps, namely license plate detection/localization and character recognition. Recognizing characters in a license plate is a very difficult task due to poor illumination conditions and rapid motion of vehicles. When using an OCR for character recognition, it is crucial to correctly remove the license plate boundaries after the step for license plate detection. No matter which OCRs are used, the recognition accuracy will be significantly reduced if the boundaries are not properly removed. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for non character area removal. The algorithm is based on the license plates detected using an AdaBoost algorithm. Then it follows the steps of character height estimation, character width estimation, segmentation and block identification. The algorithm is efficient and can be applied in real-time applications. The experiments are performed using OCR software for character recognition. It is shown that much higher recognition accuracy is obtained by gradually removing the license plate boundaries. © 2010 IEEE