Indian Vehicle License Plate Extraction and Segmentation

INDIAN VEHICLE LICENSE PLATE EXTRACTION AND SEGMENTATION Chetan Sharma1 and Amandeep Kaur2 1Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, Patiala, India E-mail: [email protected] 2Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University, Patiala, India E-mail: [email protected] Automatic License Plate Identification (ALPI) has many applications in traffic systems (highway electronic toll collection, red light violation enforcement, border and customs checkpoints etc.). This paper presents Automatic Number Plate Extraction and Character Segmentation for Indian vehicles. In India, number plate models are not followed strictly. Characters on plate are in different Indian languages, as well as in English. Due to variations in the representation of number plates, vehicle number plate extraction and character segmentation is difficult. We work on plates that contain English characters. The proposed algorithm consists of three major parts: Preprocessing of Image, Extraction of plate region and Segmentation of characters. For preprocessing of the image, histogram equalization has been applied. For extracting the Plate region, edge detection algorithm and various morphological operations are used. Character segmentation is done by using connected component and bounding box method. The accuracy of our algorithm for license plate extraction is 91.02% and for segmentation is 88.46%.