Recognition of Car License Plates using Morphological Information and SOM Algorithm

In this paper, we propose the recognition system of a license plate using SOM algorithm. The recognition of license plate was investigated by means of the SOM algorithm. The morphological information of horizontal and vertical edges was used to extract a plate region from a car image. In addition, the 4-direction contour tracking algorithm was applied to extract the specific area, which includes characters from an extracted plate area. Therefore, we proposed how to extract license plate region using morphological information and how to recognize the character string using SOM algorithm. In this paper, 50 car images were tested. The extraction rate obtained by the proposed extraction method showed better results than that from the color information of RGB and HSI, respectively. And the license plate recognition using SOM algorithm was very efficient.