Vehicle License Plate Detection Method Based on Sliding Concentric Windows and Histogram

Abstract

Detecting the region of a license plate is the key component of the vehicle license plate recognition (VLPR) system. A new method is adopted in this paper to analyze road images which often contain vehicles and extract LP from natural properties by finding vertical and horizontal edges from vehicle region. The proposed vehicle license plate detection (VLPD) method consists of three main stages: (1) a novel adaptive image segmentation technique named as sliding concentric windows (SCWs) used for detecting candidate region; (2) color verification for candidate region by using HSI color model on the basis of using hue and intensity in HSI color model verifying green and yellow LP and white LP, respectively; and (3) finally, decomposing candidate region which contains predetermined LP alphanumeric character by using position histogram to verify and detect vehicle license plate (VLP) region. In the proposed method, input vehicle images are commuted into grey images. Then the candidate regions are found by sliding concentric windows. We detect VLP region which contains predetermined LP color by using HSI color model and LP alphanumeric character by using position histogram. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective in coping with different conditions such as poor illumination, varied distances from the vehicle and varied weather.