Bees algorithm and support vector machine for Malaysian license plate recognition

Nowadays the increasing use of vehicles in modern life raises the problem of designing techniques that support effective traffic monitoring and vehicle identification. License plate recognition is an advanced machine vision technology used to identify vehicles by their license plates without direct human intervention. License plate recognition system major steps include image capturing, preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. In this paper, a complete system for Malaysian license plate recognition is proposed to handle special Malaysian license plates under different conditions. In the proposed system, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and bees algorithm is used in preprocessing and segmentation stages, Sobel method for edge detection, and support vector machine for classification. The proposed system is applied to dataset that is consisted of 1,216 grey scale images, and is compared with different methods in segmentation and classification. Results show the robustness of the proposed system, making them suitable for more real world applications.

The intent of this research is to design a license plate recognition (LPR) system in the domain of Bangla language for smart vehicle management. The proposed system is designed on the basis of computer vision tools and deep supervised machine learning model. The system has three modules: license plate detection, character segmentation and recognition of the characters of the License Plate (LP). The goal of detection is to localize the plate area from the vehicle image and to crop region of interest (LP). It is executed by applying following process: preprocessing the image, conversion to binary image, contour detection and filtering the contours to get the LP's character contours, tilt correction and cropping the plate area from the image. Then, the cropped LP is segmented to extract the characters from the plate. Finally, the recognition step classifies the characters by means of deep convolution neural network where the features of the character are crafted and learned by the convolution layers of the networks. The system is implemented in Python OpenCV environment for offline car license plates images which are taken in different illuminations, road scenarios and colored cars. The system performance is evaluated in terms of detection rate, segmentation rate, recognition rate and execution time. The results illustrate that the performance of the system is remarkable.

Almost every vehicle has currently installed black box since the stored images by black box can be used to investigate the exact cause of the accident. One of the most important aspects in an accident investigation is the license plate detection and recognition as the license plate has information about the driver and car. This paper presents a novel algorithm for license plate detection and recognition using black box image. The proposed license plate recognition system is divided into three stages: license plate detection, individual number and character extraction, and number and character recognition. The Gaussian blur filter is used to remove noise in the image and then we detect the license plate edge using modified Canny algorithm. Second, we determine license plate candidate image using morphology and support vector machine. Finally, we recognize the numbers and characters using k-nearest neighbor classifier. The experimental study results indicate that the license plate detection and recognition algorithm has been successfully implemented.

On the streets of Taiwan, many roadside tollers are often seen riding motorcycles in one hand, and the other hand holding mobile devices to issue payment notices for cars and motorcycles parked on the roadsides. The work of roadside tollers is very dangerous. First, they must first park their motorcycles next to the roadside cars and motorcycles. They then use their eyes to confirm the license plate number, enter the license plate number into the mobile device, and finally place the bill on the car’s windows or attach the bill to the motorcycles. Our idea is to implement an automated license plate recognition system in mobile devices to increase the efficiency of roadside tollers and reduce their time on the road. Recently, license plate recognition systems have been widely used in various aspects of life, such as parking lot toll systems, access management systems, and traffic management systems. However, existing license plate recognition systems must have good recognition rates under a number of constraints, such as fixed angles and fixed light sources. Moreover, due to the insufficient computing resources of the general mobile device, the application cannot have a good recognition rate in the complex environment or skewed angle in the license plate recognition. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight and high-performance multi-angle license plate character recognition model, which reduces the complexity and computational complexity of traditional license plate recognition. This paper also collects a large number of license plate images from different environments, angles and sizes as training data. Finally, we propose an optimized deep learning model to identify the characters on license plates. The experimental results show that the proposed model can recognize the license plate with a tilt of 0~60 degrees, and the overall recall rate is 84.5%. Compared with Tiny-YOLOv2, the computation of the proposed model is reduced by 61% with a little penalty of recall.

Automatic license plate recognition (LPR) plays an important role in numerous applications and a number of techniques have been proposed. However, most of them worked under restricted conditions, such as fixed illumination, limited vehicle speed, designated routes, and stationary backgrounds. In this study, as few constraints as possible on the working environment are considered. The proposed LPR technique consists of two main modules: a license plate locating module and a license number identification module. The former characterized by fuzzy disciplines attempts to extract license plates from an input image, while the latter conceptualized in terms of neural subjects aims to identify the number present in a license plate. Experiments have been conducted for the respective modules. In the experiment on locating license plates, 1088 images taken from various scenes and under different conditions were employed. Of which, 23 images have been failed to locate the license plates present in the images; the license plate location rate of success is 97.9%. In the experiment on identifying license number, 1065 images, from which license plates have been successfully located, were used. Of which, 47 images have been failed to identify the numbers of the license plates located in the images; the identification rate of success is 95.6%. Combining the above two rates, the overall rate of success for our LPR algorithm is 93.7%.

With the increasing advancement of science and technology, the popularity of automobiles in my country has gradually increased. Among them, license plate positioning and license plate recognition technology are very important key technologies in the license plate recognition system. Through the license plate positioning technology, the position information, centroid and other data information of the license plate can be obtained, so as to realize the positioning of the license plate. The license plate recognition technology can extract the uniqueness of the vehicle. Identifying the license plate number, so the design and implementation of vehicle recognition and license plate recognition technology based on embedded devices have practical significance and practical application value to promote the technological progress of intelligent transportation and vehicle recognition systems. This design is a license plate recognition system, an embedded character segmentation recognition processing platform with ARM Cortex-A9 as the core, and the method of cross-compiling OpenCV, Qt, BootLoader in the Linux operating system, and transplanting related drivers to the ARM Cortex-A9 platform; Based on the classic algorithm, the OpenCV library function is used to realize the segmentation and recognition of the license plate image characters. The experimental results show that the design has achieved the expected goal.

Traditional license plate recognition algorithms mainly employ edge detection and color detection to locate the license plate region, and then segment and recognize characters. Not only the procedure is tedious, but also is greatly affected by the ambient light, which is not suitable for the complex environment. Maximum stable extremum region (MSER) has affine invariance and adaptability to light, which is suitable for license plate recognition in complex environment. In this paper, a license plate recognition algorithm based on MSER and support vector machine is proposed. It can directly extract and recognize characters without locating license plate. Firstly, preprocessing the image and extracting the MSER is utilized. Then, most of the non-character regions can be removed through the proposed support vector machine model for the extracted regions. Besides, the character regions are screened out by using the proposed specific geometric features and arrangement rules of license plate characters. Finally, recognition of the license plate character is completed. The experimental results show that compared with the commonly used license plate recognition algorithm, the proposed algorithm combing the MSER and support vector machine model is more accurate and efficient.

Advances in both parallel processing capabilities because of graphical processing units (GPUs) and computer vision algorithms have led to the development of deep neural networks (DNN) and their utilization in real-world applications. Starting from the LeNet-5 architecture of the 1990s, modern deep neural networks may have tens to hundreds of layers to solve complex problems such as license plate detection or recognition tasks. In this manuscript, we present a review of the state-of-the-art methods related to automatic license plate recognition. Since deep networks have demonstrated a remarkable ability to outperform other machine learning techniques, we focus only on neural network based license plate recognition methods. We highlight the particular types of networks, i.e., convolutional, residual recurrent, or long-short-term-memory, used for the specific tasks of license plate detection, extraction, or recognition in different existing works. The presented summary also highlights some of the most widely used data sets for comparison and shares the results reported in the reviewed papers. We also give an overview of the effects of fog, motion, or the use of synthetic data on license plate recognition. Finally, promising directions for future research in this domain are presented.

CIS Multilingual License Plate Detection and Recognition Based on Convolutional and Transformer Neural Networks

Automatic License plate detection and recognition system is special form of optical character recognition and has been an active research domain in image processing field. However, the accuracy is varied due to different styles of number plates endorsed. Besides, the characters on Malaysia license plate are in one or two lines. Thus, the proposed license plate recognition (LPR) technique of this research is able to achieve the best recognition performance based on Malaysia license plate vehicle registration number characters. This paper presents a study of applying the template matching method for character image recognition. The database of characters and license plate image has been created by collecting images from various type of car. The initial pre-processing involves image enhancement, binarization, filtering and segmenting of license plate. There are 100 license plates that contain 693 characters have been tested, and the result shown that 92.78 % of all characters is correctly recognized. Thus, template matching can be classified as one of the promising algorithm for recognizing Malaysia license plate.

The process of recognizing a vehicle involves detection of the vehicle, recognition of the vehicle model, and identification of the vehicle. The process of vehicle identification involves identification of the vehicle itself, such as by recognition of the license plate on the vehicle. License plate recognition can have many applications, such as conventional traffic volume measurements, vehicle identification for charging purposes on toll roads, the determination of in-contract vehicles in parking garages, and monitoring the arrival of specific vehicles. For these applications, the authors have developed a sensing method that produces little wobbling of captured images of moving vehicles and generates halation-free images under wide-ranging environmental conditions from bright direct sunlight to poorly illuminated conditions at night. The method involves the use of a beam splitter to divide incident rays into two directions, a transmitted beam and a reflected beam of different light intensities, and synthesizing two captured images using CCD devices from each beam, thus producing fluctuation-free images of a wide dynamic range even when the subject is moving. The experimental sensing device is capable of shooting scenes with a dynamic range of 1.5 × 104 at a shutter speed of 1/1000 second. Simultaneously, a license plate recognition method was developed. A prototype license plate recognition system was also developed using the experimental sensing device. The system achieved a 98.7% recognition rate on 466 images of moving vehicles, which demonstrates its effectiveness as a license plate recognition system. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 31(11): 82–91, 2000

Traditional license plate recognition technology mostly uses traditional image processing methods to find out the characteristics of the license plate, and then crop and recognize the characters. The process needs to be modified due to the different environments, scenes and conditions. In recent years, many studies have implemented license plate and character recognition by using deep learning algorithms. Although it has a good recognition accuracy, the calculation speed still cannot reach the level of real-time recognition. This research proposes a real-time license plate recognition system based on YOLOv3, which uses deep learning model to realize the vehicle license plate recognition, lane identification and vehicle trajectory tracking. In this study, a web-based platform is established to present the result of license plate recognition and trajectory, and the streaming roadside video in the campus. In the platform, license plates of driving vehicles can be identified in real-time, and the user can search and track specific vehicle intuitively. In the experiment, the average accuracy of the system performs 84.3% in real-time license plate recognition, and 100% in lane identification. The system can process in 40 FPS, which can meet the level of real-time system. In the future, the system can cooperate with traffic access control in campus or community to improve the efficiency of traffic control.

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems have become an important tool to track stolen cars, access control, and monitor traffic. ALPR system consists of locating the license plate in an image, followed by character detection and recognition. Since the license plate can exist anywhere within an image, localisation is the most important part of ALPR and requires greater processing time. Most ALPR systems are computationally intensive and require a high‐performance computer. The present algorithm differs significantly from those utilised in previous ALPR technologies by offering a fast algorithm, composed of structural elements which more precisely conducts morphological operations within an image, and can be implemented in portable devices with low computation capabilities. The present algorithm is able to accurately detect and differentiate license plates in complex images. This method was first tested through MATLAB with an on‐line public database of Greek number plates and was 100% accurate in all clear images, and achieved 98.45% accuracy when using the entire database which included complex backgrounds and license plates obscured by shadow and dirt. Second, the efficiency of the algorithm was tested in devices with low computational processing power, by translating the code to Python, and was 300% faster than previous work.

In this paper, we propose a novel image segmentation algorithm for license plate recognition (LPR) in video based traffic surveillance system. The license plate character segmentation is most important procedure in LPR system. However, in real situation, the character segmentation algorithms are challenged by drastic performance decrease due to sudden local illumination changes, especially when the color of characters is similar to that of background in LP. To mitigate this problem, we introduce a novel LP character segmentation algorithm by employing an adaptive binarization method using super-pixel based degeneracy factor. The proposed method demonstrates a significant improvement over conventional methods.

Efficient and accurate license plate recognition (LPR) in unconstrained environments remains a critical challenge, particularly when confronted with skewed imaging angles and the limited computational capabilities of edge devices. In this study, we propose a high-performance, FPGA-based license plate alignment and recognition (LPAR) system to address these issues. Our LPAR system integrates lightweight deep learning models, including YOLOv4-tiny for license plate detection, a refined convolutional pose machine (CPM) for pose estimation and alignment, and a modified LPRNet for character recognition. By restructuring the pose estimation and alignment architectures to enhance the geometric correction of license plates and adding channel and spatial attention mechanisms to LPRNet for better character recognition, the proposed LPAR system improves recognition accuracy from 88.33% to 95.00%. The complete pipeline achieved a processing speed of 2.00 frames per second (FPS) on a resource-constrained FPGA platform, demonstrating its practical viability for real-time deployment in edge computing scenarios.