Automatic Vehicle License Plate Recognition System Based on Image Processing and Template Matching Approach

Abstract

A vehicle license plate recognition system is an important proficiency that could be used for identification of engine vehicle all over the earth. It is valuable in numerous applications such as entrance admission, security, parking control, road traffic control, and speed control. However, the system only manages to identify the license number and needs an operator to control the collected data. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic license plate recognition system by using the image processing and template matching approach. The current study aims to increase the efficiency of license plate recognition system for Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) smart university. This venture comprises of simulation program to recognize license plate characters where a captured image of vehicles will be the input. Then, these images will be processed using several image processing techniques and optical character recognition method in order to recognize the segmented number plate. The image processing techniques consist of colour conversion, image segmentation using Otsu's thresholding, noise removal, image subtraction, image cropping and bounding box feature. The optical character recognition based on template matching approach is used to analyse the printed characters on the segmented license plate image and to produce an output data consisting of characters. Overall, the proposed automatic vehicle license plate recognition system is capable to perform the recognition process by successfully recognizing license plate of 13 cars, from a total of 14 cars.