A hybrid method for robust car plate character recognition

Image-based car plate recognition is an indispensable part of an intelligent traffic system. The quality of the images taken for car plates, especially for Chinese car plates, however, may sometimes be very poor, due to the operating conditions and distortion because of poor photographical environments. Furthermore, there exist some "similar" characters, such as "8" and "B", "7" and "T" and so on. They are less distinguishable because of noises and/or distortions. To achieve robust and high recognition performance, in this paper, a two-stage hybrid recognition system combining statistical and structural recognition methods is proposed. Car plate images are skew corrected and normalized before recognition. In the first stage, four statistical sub-classifiers recognize the input character independently, and the recognition results are combined using the Bayes method. If the output of the first stage contains characters that belong to prescribed sets of similarity characters, structure recognition method is used to further classify these character images: they are preprocessed once more, structure features are obtained from them and these structure features are fed into a decision tree classifier. Finally, genetic algorithm is employed to achieve optimum system parameters. Experiments show that our recognition system is very efficient and robust. As part of an intelligent traffic system, the system has been in successful commercial use. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.