Vehicle License Plate Identification & Recognition

__________________________________________________________________________ Existing vehicle license plate identification and recognition systems are potent for either their accuracy or speed but not a combination of both. The algorithm proposed in this dissertation attempts to achieve this fine balance between the accuracy and speed that such a system must posses. The mathematical morphology operators of dilation and erosion are utilized to identify the region within an image which contains the license plate. Using the concept of color coherence vectors, an image recognition algorithm is presented which utilizes this extracted region and compares it as a whole to other images of license plates, in the database. The application developed for the testing of this algorithm works with an accuracy of eighty eight percent and an average processing time of two seconds per image.