10-09-2013, 11:48 AM
Car Number Plate Recognition System
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ABSTRACT
Car Number Plate Recognition System means to extract the number plate characters in ASCII format from the image. The aim of the project is to provide traffic management, control and other related applications
This system takes a vehicle image of any size breaks it into smaller image pieces. These pieces are then analyzed to locate the exact location of number plate in the image. Once the area of the number plate (its x and y coordinates) is found the plate is parsed to extract the character from it. These characters are then given to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module. OCR program recognizes those characters and converts them to ASCII format.The technique used in finding the exact location of number plate in the vehicle image is signature technique. The plate thus obtained is given to the OCR module. The goal of Optical Character Recognition is to classify optical patterns (often contained in a digital image) corresponding to alphanumeric or other characters. The process of OCR involves several steps including segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Templates are 2D correlated to extract the characters.
INTRODUCTION
“Car Number Plate Recognition” system uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert images of vehicle registration numbers into information for real time or retrospective matching with law enforcement and other databases. This system is an integrated hardware-software device that reads the vehicles number plate and outputs the number plate number in ASCII - to some data processing system. This system is also known as License Plate Recognition (LPR) and Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems .It is believed that there are currently more than half a billion cars on the roads worldwide. All those vehicles have their Vehicle Identification Number as their primary identifier. The vehicle identification number is actually a license number which states a legal license to participate in the public traffic. All vehicle world-wide should have its license number - written on a license plate - mounted onto its body (at least at the back side) and no vehicle without properly mounted, well visible and well readable license plate should run on the roads.The license number is the most important identification data a computer system should treat when dealing with vehicles. If the data is already in the computer most of these tasks are rather easy to be carried out.Suppose a company's security manager would require a system that precisely tells at every moment where the cars of the company are: in the garage or out on roads. By registering every single drive-out from and drive-in to the garage, the system could always tell which car is out and which is in. The key issue of this task is that the registration of the movement of the vehicles should be done automatically by the system, otherwise it would require manpower.
HISTORY
The Car Number Plate Recognition System was invented in 1976 at the Police Scientific Development Branch in the UK. Prototype systems were working by 1979 and contracts were let to produce industrial systems, first at EMI Electronics then at Computer Recognition Systems (CRS) in Wokingham, UK. Early trial systems were first used in Britain in 1979 with trial units placed on the A1 road and the Dartford tunnel. To minimize errors, license plate's character font, positioning and sizes were optimized for the character recognition systems used. The first arrest due to a detected stolen car was made in 1981.
Early CNPR systems were unable to read white or silver lettering on black background, as permitted on UK vehicles built prior to 1973.
CONCLUSION
There are frequent situations in which a system able to recognize registration numbers. Our project deals with the identification of the characters from the image of the car (containing number plate). The basic ideas of the project are discussed in brief.