Practical Design of an Automatic License Plate Recognition Using Image Processing Technique

The strategy of this paper is to present a practical design of an automatic system for opening a gate without mounting any signal transmitter on the car. License plate recognition (LPR) is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by their license plates. This paper’s goal is to build a practical prototype system, which is capable of recognizing a license plate number from a standard license plate. Thus, this paper is to investigate and construct an application whereby the system will recognize the vehicle license plate at a gate entrance of the parking lot. The system will be based on a personal computer and software packages available such as MATLAB and a digital camera that helps in capturing images of vehicles. The software recognizes the plate number, compares the plate number with a built in database, and decides whether a vehicle is allowed to enter the designated area or not. The general algorithm involves the following steps: Image capturing which can be achieved by a digital camera. Plate localization and extraction to obtain the vehicle plate sub image. Character segmentation to determine exactly where characters exist inside the plate. Recognition which identifies the numbers contained in the plate. Evaluating the performance of the algorithm. Designing a database to store the numbers of authorized vehicles that are allowed to enter the parking. Designing a graphical user interface (GUI) to simplify the interaction with the software.