Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) through smart Phones using Image Processing Techniques

Abstract

Correct recognition of vehicles violating traffic rules and regulations is a major challenge in the present complex traffic environment. An automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system plays an important role in the detection of such events. In this paper, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) was designed and implemented on Android mobile phone platform. First, the graphical user interface (GUI) for capturing image using built-in camera was developed to acquire car plate number. Second, the preprocessing of raw image was done using contrast enhancement, filtering, and straightening. Next, an optical character recognition (OCR) using neural network was utilized to extract texts and numbers. The proposed ANPR algorithm was implemented and simulated using Android SDK on a smart phone or PC. Future research includes optimizing the system for mobile phone implementation with limited CPU and memory resources, and geo-tagging of the image using GPS coordinates and online database for various mobile applications.