Development of a Model for Electronic Toll-Collection System

Abstract

The paper presents a new method for electronic toll collection system and to match car number plate detection system. The electronic toll collection system (ETS) has been fabricated based on microcontroller. Here a system is developed to collect tolls according to the weight of the vehicle. The car number plate detection method utilizes template matching technique to approximate the location of car number plate. Then, using this output from the template matching method, color information is used to eliminate the unwanted color areas from the approximate number plate region without affecting the correct color regions. Hence, the number plate region can be determined more accurately. This work can easily be done by image processing system using MATLAB. The method has low complexity and reduced the processing time magnificently. This automated system also shows a better performance in highway traffic management. This paper shows the gateway to fabricate a highly automated toll-plaza. The purpose of this paper is to collect toll according to the weight of the vehicles and to build a real time application which recognizes license plates from cars at a gate, for example at the entrance of a parking area. The system, based on regular PC with video camera, catches video frames which include a visible car license plate and processes them. Once a license plate is detected, its digits are recognized, displayed on the User Interface or checked against a database. The focus is on the design of algorithms used for extracting the license plate from a single image, isolating the characters of the plate and identifying the individual characters. Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) is a technology that allows for electronic payment of tolls. The endeavor of our work was to develop a highly automated toll-collection system. The automated system classifies (1) a vehicle based on its load range. In recent world, while collecting tolls in the bridges/ tunnels there may arise various problems such as: lengthy process for money transactions, which leads long traffic congestion as well. Here in Bangladesh the toll collection system is not developed. Moreover, it is time consuming and not accurate. The overloaded vehicles give the same amount of toll like the unloaded one though the overloaded vehicles damage the bridge more than that of the unloaded one. In some cases the vehicles carry a huge amount of load which crosses the legal limit. Moreover, corruption is also a major problem here. This is why; such a toll collection system is fabricated here. This toll-collection system is designed for achieving a fraud free and completely auditable operation by accurately detecting and registering vehicle movements and toll collector's activities. A central control system is introduced here for online monitoring of the tool-plaza. A pressure sensor is used to measure the weight of the vehicles which gives analogous data to the microcontroller. The microcontroller takes the data from the pressure sensor and gives the output data as a unit of currency. A system is also introduced here to control the barricade with the micro controller (2). Whenever the load of the vehicle is measured then the toll is collected and then the barricade is opened. It just takes a few moments and by doing this a better traffic management is also confirmed as well as the accurate measurement of the load of the vehicle. The objectives of image processing based electronic toll collection are many. It gives an accurate data as well as saves the license plate of the vehicles to recognize any unwanted vehicle.