A Novel Method for Car License Plate Detection

With an increasing number of vehicles on roads, it is getting difficult to manually enforce laws and traffic rules for their smooth traffic flow. This paper proposes a fast method for car-license plate detection with three major contributions in the real life. The first contribution is that a fast Vertical Edge Detection Algorithm (VEDA) is proposed to detect the contrast between the gray scale values of the image. After binarization the input image using adaptive thresholding (AT), an unnecessary-line elimination algorithm (ULEA) is proposed to enhance the image and then, the VEDA is applied. Very-low-resolution images taken by a web camera is also processed by this method. After the vertical edges have been detected by the VEDA, the desired plate details based on color information are highlighted. Finally, an LP is detected. The third contribution is to compare the VEDA to the principal visual word discovery matching in terms of accuracy and processing time. Results show that the computation time of the CLPD method is 47.7 ms, which meets the real-time requirements.