An Automatic Number Plate Recognition System under Image Processing

Abstract

Automatic Number Plate Recognition system is an application of computer vision and image processing technology that takes photograph of vehicles as input image and by extracting their number plate from whole vehicle image , it display the number plate information into text. Mainly the ANPR system consists of 4 phases: Acquisition of Vehicle Image and PreProcessing, Extraction of Number Plate Area, Character Segmentation and Character Recognition. The overall accuracy and efficiency of whole ANPR system depends on number plate extraction phase as character segmentation and character recognition phases are also depend on the output of this phase. Further the accuracy of Number Plate Extraction phase depends on the quality of captured vehicle image. Higher be the quality of captured input vehicle image more will be the chances of proper extraction of vehicle number plate area. The existing methods of ANPR works well for dark and bright/light categories image but it does not work well for Low Contrast, Blurred and Noisy images and the detection of exact number plate area by using the existing ANPR approach is not successful even after applying existing filtering and enhancement technique for these types of images. Due to wrong extraction of number plate area, the character segmentation and character recognition are also not successful in this case by using the existing method. To overcome these drawbacks I proposed an efficient approach for ANPR in which the input vehicle image is pre-processed firstly by iterative bilateral filtering , adaptive histogram equalization and number plate is extracted from pre-processed vehicle image using morphological operations, image subtraction, image binarization/thresholding, sobel vertical edge detection and by boundary box analysis. Sometimes the extracted plate area also contains noise, bolts, frames etc. So the extracted plate area is enhanced by using morphological operations to improve the quality of extracted plate so that the segmentation phase gives more successful output. The character segmentation is done by connected component analysis and boundary box analysis and finally in the last character recognition phase, the characters are recognized by matching with the template database using correlation and output results are displayed. This approach works well for low contrast, blurred, noisy as well as for dark and light/bright category images. The comparison is done between the ANPR with Adaptive Histogram Equalization and Iterative Bilateral Filtering that is the proposed approach and the existing ANPR approach using metrics: MSE, PSNR and Success rate.