A Novel Approach for Automatic Car Plate Detection and Recognition

Abstract

The increasing number of cars inside cities creates problems in traffic control. This issue can be solved by implementing a computer-based automatic system known as the Automatic Car Plate Recognition System (ACPRS). The main purpose of the current paper is to propose an automatic system to detect, extract, segment, and recognize the car plate numbers in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). To do so, a frontal image of cars is captured and used as an input of the system. After applying the required pre-processing steps, the SURF descriptor is utilized to detect and extract the car plate from the whole input image. After segmentation of the extracted plate, an efficient projection-based technique is being exploited to describe the available digits and the city name of the registered car plate. The system is evaluated over 200 sample images, which are taken under various testing conditions. The best accuracy of the proposed system, under the controlled condition, shows the high performance and accuracy of the system which is 94%.

Keywords

• automatic car plate recognition
• surf descriptor
• segmentation
• character recognition
• digit recognition
• horizontal projection
• vertical projection