A new and robust method for character segmentation and recognition in license plate images

This paper provides a new and fast method for segmentation and recognition of characters in license plate images. For this purpose, various methods have been proposed in literature. However, most of them suffer from: sensitivity to non-uniform illumination distribution, existence of shade in license plate, license plate color and the need for receiving an exact image of the license plate. In the proposed algorithm, non-uniform illumination and noise are reduced by a Gaussian lowpass filter and also by an innovational Laplacian-like transform and characters are segmented by a set of indigenous and relative features. To be prepared for recognition, the segmented characters are normalized by a local algorithm. Two feed-forward neural networks with back-propagation learning method are employed for character recognition. The principal component analysis (PCA) is used to decrease input data and, consequently, computational complexity. The proposed algorithm does not necessarily need an exact plate image and can receive a band from the vehicle original image as an input, which includes the plate. Our proposed method is completely robust to the disturbances such as non-uniform brightness distribution on the various positions of a license plate image and the plate color. In order to evaluate our algorithm, we applied it on a database including 120 vehicle images with different backgrounds, plate colors, brightness distributions, distances and viewing angles. The results confirm the robustness of the proposed method against severe imaging conditions. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.