ILPR: an Indian license plate recognition system

Abstract

One of the major concerns of Integrated Traffic Management System (ITMS) in India is the identification of vehicles violating the stop-line at a road crossing. A large number of Indian vehicles do not stop at the designated stop-line and pose serious threat to the pedestrians crossing the roads. The current work reports the technicalities of the i$$ i $$LPR (Indian License Plate Recognition) system implemented at five busy road-junctions in one populous metro city in India. The designed system is capable of localizing single line and two-line license plates of various sizes and shapes, recognizing characters of standard/ non-standard fonts and performing seamlessly in varying weather conditions. The performance of the system is evaluated with a large database of images for different environmental conditions. We have published a limited database of Indian vehicle images in http://code.google.com/p/cmaterdb/ for non-commercial use by fellow researchers. Despite unparallel complexity in the Indian city-traffic scenario, we have achieved around 92 % plate localization accuracy and 92.75 % plate level recognition accuracy over the localized vehicle images.