Abstract
Vehicle license plate recognition identifies vehicle as a unique, and have many applications in traffic monitoring field. In this paper, a vertical edge based algorithm to extract license plate within input gray-scale image is proposed. A size-and-shape filter based on seed-filling algorithm is applied to remove the edges that are impossible to be the vertical edges of license plate. Then the remaining edges are matched with each other according to some restricted conditions so as to locate license plate in input image. After license plate is extracted. normalized and segmented, the characters on it are recognized by template matching method. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can deal with license plates in normal shape effectively, as well as the license plates that are out of shape due to the angle of view.