• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.8
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• pp.187-195
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• 2013

Most of former studies for car license plate detection restrict the image acquisition environment. The aim of this research is to diminish the restrictions by proposing a new method of using SIFT and neural network. SIFT can be used in diverse situations with less restriction because it provides size- and rotation-invariance and large discriminating power. SIFT extracted from the license plate image is divided into the internal(inside class) and the external(outside class) ones and the classifier is trained using them. In the proposed method, by just putting the various types of license plates, the trained neural network classifier can process all of the types. Although the classification performance is not high, the inside class appears densely over the plate region and sparsely over the non-plate regions. These characteristics create a local feature map, from which we can identify the location with the global maximum value as a candidate of license plate region. We collected image database with much less restriction than the conventional researches. The experiment and evaluation were done using this database. In terms of classification accuracy of SIFT keypoints, the correct recognition rate was 97.1%. The precision rate was 62.0% and recall rate was 50.2%. In terms of license plate detection rate, the correct recognition rate was 98.6%.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.4 no.10
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• pp.2461-2469
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• 1997

Target detection and recognition problems, in which neural networks are widely used, require translation invariant and real-time processing in addition to the requirements that general pattern recognition problems need. This paper presents a novel architecture that meets the requirements and explains effective methodology to train the network. The proposed neural network is an architectural extension of the shared-weight neural network that is composed of the feature extraction stage followed by the pattern recognition stage. Its feature extraction stage performs correlational operation on the input with a weight kernel, and the entire neural network can be considered a nonlinear correlation filter. Therefore, the output of the proposed neural network is correlational plane with peak values at the location of the target. The architecture of this neural network is suitable for implementing with parallel or distributed computers, and this fact allows the application to the problems which require realtime processing. Net training methodology to overcome the problem caused by unbalance of the number of targets and non-targets is also introduced. To verify the performance, the proposed network is applied to detection and recognition problem of a specific automobile driving around in a parking lot. The results show no false alarms and fast processing enough to track a target that moves as fast as about 190 km per hour.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.9 no.1 s.16
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• pp.7-18
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• 2005

A key component of an autonomous mobile robot is to localize itself accurately and build a map of the environment simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a vision-based mobile robot localization and mapping algorithm using scale-invariant features. A camera with fisheye lens facing toward to ceiling is attached to the robot to acquire high-level features with scale invariance. These features are used in map building and localization process. As pre-processing, input images from fisheye lens are calibrated to remove radial distortion then labeling and convex hull techniques are used to segment ceiling region from wall region. At initial map building process, features are calculated for segmented regions and stored in map database. Features are continuously calculated from sequential input images and matched against existing map until map building process is finished. If features are not matched, they are added to the existing map. Localization is done simultaneously with feature matching at map building process. Localization. is performed when features are matched with existing map and map building database is updated at same time. The proposed method can perform a map building in 2 minutes on $50m^2$ area. The positioning accuracy is ${\pm}13cm$, the average error on robot angle with the positioning is ${\pm}3$ degree.