• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.1004-1012
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• 2007

In this paper, we proposed a new car license plate recognition method using an unsupervised ART2 algorithm with HSI color model. The proposed method consists of two main modules; extracting plate area from a vehicle image and recognizing the characters in the plate after that. To extract plate area, hue(H) component of HSI color model is used, and the sub-area containing characters is acquired using modified fuzzy binarization method. Each character is further divided by a 4-directional edge tracking algorithm. To recognize the separated characters, noise-robust ART2 algorithm is employed. When the proposed algorithm is applied to recognize license plate characters, the extraction rate is better than that of existing RGB model and the overall recognition rate is about 97.4%.