Bounding Box and Thresholding in Optical Character Recognition for Car License Plate Recognition

Abstract

License plate recognition plays a central role in a variety of application contexts, including traffic management, automated parking, and law enforcement. Among the various approaches available, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique has proven its effectiveness in recognizing characters in license plate images. This study describes an approach for detecting and recognizing vehicle license plates by utilizing the OCR method with Bounding Box, Thresholding, and template matching. In addition, this study uses MATLAB R2022a software as the main tool in developing and implementing the method. The goal is to recognize vehicle license plates from images, describe their characteristics, and generate relevant information. This approach involves a series of image processing steps starting with the pre-processing stage, followed by the process of binarization and license plate segmentation. After successfully isolating the license plate area, isolating the character using a bounding box is performed using image separation techniques. The OCR method is used to recognize license plate characters through comparison using the correlation method. Through a series of experiments on several image datasets, this approach succeeded in showing that out of 20 sampled license plate images, the results obtained were a reading accuracy of 93.55% of 100%, recognizing 13 out of 20 license plate images accurately when tested. Thus, the findings of this research are expected to contribute to the recognition of vehicle license plates that are accurate and efficient, by utilizing image processing techniques and OCR methods implemented using MATLAB R2022a software.