Optimization of ANPR algorithm on android mobile phone

Abstract

Since the past decades, many researchers proposed their methods to recognize the vehicle number plate. One of the methods is template matching which is executed in the optical character recognition (OCR) step of the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system. In previous researches, many researchers are used a high end desktop PC and high resolution camera to implement the ANPR system. In this paper, the optimization of ANPR algorithm on limited hardware of Android mobile phone is presented. First, various steps to optimize ANPR and OCR block using template matching are described. Our proposed algorithm was based on Tesseract library. For comparison purpose, the template matching based OCR will be compared to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based OCR. The optimization on ANPR was performed as currently there is no image processing tool available on the standard Android mobile phone. By optimization of ANPR, many advantages could be achieved, such as higher recognition accuracy, less resource consumption, and less computational complexity. Results on 30 images showed that the recognition rate was 97.46% while the processing time was 1.13.