• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.61-71
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• 2009

Vehicle license plate is the only way to check the registrated information of a vehicle. Many works have been devoted to the vision system of recognizing the license plate, which has been widely used to control an illegal parking. However, it is difficult to correctly segment characters on the license plate since an illumination is affected by a weather change and a neighboring obstacles. This paper proposes a robust method of segmenting the character of the license plate on irregular illumination condition. The proposed method enhance the contrast of license plate images using the Chi-Square probability density function. For segmenting characters on the license plate, binary images with the high quality are gained by applying the adaptive threshold. Preprocessing and labeling algorithm are used to eliminate noises existing during the whole segmentation process. Finally, profiling method is applied to segment characters on license plate from binary images.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.13B no.4 s.107
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• pp.353-360
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• 2006

This paper presents a robust algorithm for segmenting a vehicle license plate area from a road image. We consider the features of license plates in three aspects : 1) edges due to the characters in the plate, 2) colors in the plate, and 3) geometric properties of the plate. In the preprocessing step, we compute the thresholds based on each feature to decide whether a pixel is inside a plate or not. A statistical approach is applied to the sample images to compute the thresholds. For a given road image, our algorithm binarizes it by using the thresholds. Then, we select three candidate regions to be a plate by searching the binary image with a moving window. The plate area is selected among the candidates with simple heuristics. This algorithm robustly detects the plate against the transformation or the difference of color intensity of the plate in the input image. Moreover, the preprocessing step requires only a small number of sample images for the statistical processing. The experimental results show that the algorithm has 97.8% of successful segmentation of the plate from 228 input images. Our prototype implementation shows average processing time of 0.676 seconds per image for a set of $1280{\times}960$ images, executed on a 3GHz Pentium4 PC with 512M byte memory.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.1449-1461
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a vehicle recognition system based on the classification of vehicle identification mark and recognition of vehicle license plate. In the proposed algorithm, From the input vehicle image, we first simulate preprocessing procedures such as noise reduction, thinning etc., and detect vehicle identification mark and license plate region using the frequency distribution of intensity variation. And then, we classify extracted vehicle candidate region into identification mark, character and number of vehicle by using structural feature informations of vehicle. Lastly, we recognize vehicle informations with recognition of identification mark, character and number of vehicle using hybrid and vertical/horizontal pattern vector method. In the proposed algorithm, we used three properties of vehicle informations such as Independency property, discriminance property and frequency distribution of intensity variation property. In the vehicle images, identification mark is generally independent of the types of vehicle and vehicle identification mark. And also, the license plate region between character and background as well as horizontal/vertical intensity variations are more noticeable than other regions. To show the efficiency of the propofed algorithm, we tested it on 350 vehicle images and found that the propofed method shows good Performance regardless of irregular environment conditions as well as noise, size, and location of vehicles.