Detection and Recognition of Malaysian Special License Plate Based On SIFT Features

Automated car license plate recognition systems are developed and applied for purpose of facilitating the surveillance, law enforcement, access control and intelligent transportation monitoring with least human intervention. In this paper, an algorithm based on SIFT feature points clustering and matching is proposed to address the issue of recognizing Malaysian special plates. These special plates do not follow the normal standard car plates’ format as they may contain italic, cursive, connected and small letters. The algorithm is tested with 150 Malaysian special plate images under different environment and the promising experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is relatively robust. Keywords-license plate recognition, scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), feature extraction, homography, special license plate.