A vehicle license plate recognition system based on analysis of maximally stable extremal regions

Abstract

Vehicle License Plate Recognition (VLPR) system is a core module in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In this paper, a VLPR system is proposed. Considering that license plate localization is the most important and difficult part in VLPR system, we present an effective license plate localization method based on analysis of Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) features. Firstly, MSER detector is utilized to extract candidate character regions. Secondly, the exact locations of license plates are inferred according to the arrangement of characters in standard license plates. The advantage of this license plate localization method is that less assumption of environmental illumination, weather and other conditions is made. After license plate localization, we continue to recognize the license plate characters and color to complete the whole VLPR system. Finally, the proposed VLPR system is tested on our own collected dataset. The experimental results show the availability and effectiveness of our VLPR system in locating and recognizing all the explicit license plates in an image.