• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제13권5호
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• pp.2509-2528
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• 2019

There are various styles of license plates for different countries and use cases that require style-specific methods. In this paper, we propose and illustrate a multi-style license plate recognition system. The proposed system performs a series of processes for license plate candidates detection, structure classification, character segmentation and character recognition, respectively. Specifically, we introduce a license plate structure classification process to identify its style that precedes character segmentation and recognition processes. We use a K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm with pre-training steps to recognize numbers and characters on multi-style license plates. To show feasibility of our multi-style license plate recognition system, we evaluate our system for multi-style license plates covering single line, double line, different backgrounds and character colors on Korean and the U.S. license plates. For the evaluation of Korean license plate recognition, we used a 50 minutes long input video that contains 138 vehicles of 6 different license plate styles, where each frame of the video is processed through a series of license plate recognition processes. From two experiments results, we show that various LP styles can be recognized under 50 ms processing time and with over 99% accuracy, and can be extended through additional learning and training steps.

• 산업공학
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• 제14권3호
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• pp.296-301
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• 2001

The focus of this study is to redesign the Korean license plate by comparing the USA's plate with European plate formed by 1-line system in order to increase a read rate of Korea license plate. And we have compared the read rate of the new design license plate with that of the present license plate and that of the license plate studied so far. As an experimental method (used in a precedent research), we use three kinds of methods that are the measurement of the read-distance, the measurement reading-rate under the short-term exposure and the measurement of the reading-rate when driving. First, three kinds of measurements for plates of five nations are performed. Then we redesign the new Korean license plate under the base of read rates obtained by five nation's plate. As alternatives, we choose five license plates. Those alternatives are the redesigned license plate, the present license plate, the license plate studied so far, and two types of eternity license plates made by the Korea Transport Institute. When we compare results of the read-distance, there is no significant in term of different the read-distance between the alternatives. But there is a significant difference in term of the misreading-rate and the read-rate when diving. Therefore, it is necessary to redesign the present license plates because of a high misreading-rate.

• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전자공학회 2002년도 ITC-CSCC -2
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• pp.1256-1259
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• 2002

In this paper, we have proposed license plate recognition system for multi-national vehicle license plate using geometric features along with hybrid and seven segment pattern vectors. In the proposed system, we suggested to find horizontal and vertical relation after going through preparation process with inputted real-time license plate image of Korea and Japan, and then to classify license plate with using characteristic and geometric information of license plates. It classifies the extracted license plate images into letters and numbers, such as local name, local number, classification character and license consecutive numbers, and recognize license plate of Korea and Japan by applying hybrid and seven segments pattern vectors to classified letter and number region. License plate extraction step of the proposed system uses width and length information along with relative rate of Korean and Japanese license plate. Moreover, it exactly segmentation by letters with using each letter and number position information within license plate region, and recognizes Korean and Japanese license plates by applying hybrid and seven segment pattern vectors, containing characteristics related to letter size and movement within segmented letter area. As the result of testing the proposed system in real experiment, it recognized regardless of external lighting conditions as well as classifying license plates by nations, Korea and Japan. We have developed a system, recognizing regardless of inputted structural character of vehicle licenses and external environment.

• 한국산업융합학회 논문집
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• 제24권6_2호
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• pp.699-706
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• 2021

Existing license plate recognition system is used as an optical character recognition method, but a method of using deep learning has been proposed in recent studies because it has problems with image quality and Korean misrecognition. This requires a lot of data collection, but the collection of license plates is not easy to collect due to the problem of the Personal Information Protection Act, and labeling work to designate the location of individual license plates is required, but it also requires a lot of time. Therefore, in this paper, to solve this problem, five types of license plates were created using a virtual Korean license plate generation program according to the notice of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. And the generated license plate is synthesized in the license plate part of collectable vehicle images to construct 10,147 learning data to be used in deep learning. The learning data classifies license plates, Korean, and numbers into individual classes and learn using YOLOv5. Since the proposed method recognizes letters and numbers individually, if the font does not change, it can be recognized even if the license plate standard changes or the number of characters increases. As a result of the experiment, an accuracy of 96.82% was obtained, and it can be applied not only to the learned license plate but also to new types of license plates such as new license plates and eco-friendly license plates.

• 방송공학회논문지
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• 제24권5호
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• pp.713-725
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• 2019

번호판 자동인식(ALPR: Automatic License Plate Recognition)은 지능형 교통시스템 및 비디오 감시 시스템 등 많은 응용 분야에서 필요한 기술이다. 대부분의 연구는 자동차를 대상으로 번호판 감지 및 인식을 연구하였고, 오토바이를 대상으로 번호판 감지 및 인식은 매우 적은 편이다. 자동차의 경우 번호판이 차량의 전방 또는 후방 중앙에 위치하며 번호판의 뒷배경은 주로 단색으로 덜 복잡한 편이다. 그러나 오토바이의 경우 킥 스탠드를 이용하여 세우기 때문에 주차할 때 오토바이는 다양한 각도로 기울어져 있으므로 번호판의 글자 및 숫자 인식하는 과정이 훨씬 더 복잡하다. 본 논문에서는 다양한 각도로 주차된 오토바이 데이터세트에 대하여 번호판의 문자 인식 정확도를 높이기 위하여 2-스테이지 YOLOv2 알고리즘을 사용하여 오토바이 영역을 선 검출 후 번호판 영역을 검지한다. 인식률을 높이기 위해 앵커박스의 사이즈와 개수를 오토바이 특성에 맞추어 조절하였다. 그 후 기울어진 번호판을 검출한 후 영상 워핑 알고리즘을 적용하였다. 모의실험 결과, 기존 방식의 인식률이 47.74%에 비해 제안된 방식은 80.23%의 번호판의 인식률을 얻었다. 제안된 방법은 전체적으로 오토바이 번호판 특성에 맞는 앵커박스와 이미지 워핑을 통해서 다양한 기울기의 오토바이 번호판 문자 인식을 높일 수 있었다.

• 한국멀티미디어학회논문지
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• 제20권8호
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• pp.1166-1174
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• 2017

In general, the detection of the vehicle license plate is a previous step of license plate recognition and has been actively studied for several decades. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to detect a license plate area of a moving vehicle from a video captured by a fixed camera installed on the road using the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) technology. First, license plate images and non-license plate images are applied to a previously learned CNN model (AlexNet) to extract and classify features. Then, after detecting the moving vehicle in the video, CNN detects the license plate area by comparing the features of the license plate region with the features of the license plate area. Experimental result shows relatively good performance in various environments such as incomplete lighting, noise due to rain, and low resolution. In addition, to protect personal information this proposed system can also be used independently to detect the license plate area and hide that area to secure the public's personal information.

• 한국통신학회논문지
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• 제38C권12호
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• pp.1114-1125
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• 2013

License Plate Detection (LPD) is a key component in automatic license plate recognition system. Despite the success of License Plate Recognition (LPR) methods in the past decades, the problem is quite a challenge due to the diversity of plate formats and multiform outdoor illumination conditions during image acquisition. This paper aims at automatical detection of car license plates via image processing techniques. In this paper, we proposed a real-time and robust method for license plate detection using Heuristic Energy Map(HEM). In the vehicle image, the region of license plate contains many components or edges. We obtain the edge energy values of an image by using the box filter and search for the license plate region with high energy values. Using this energy value information or Heuristic Energy Map(HEM), we can easily detect the license plate region from vehicle image with a very high possibilities. The proposed method consists two main steps: Region of Interest (ROI) Detection and License Plate Detection. This method has better performance in speed and accuracy than the most of existing methods used for license plate detection. The proposed method can detect a license plate within 130 milliseconds and its detection rate is 99.2% on a 3.10-GHz Intel Core i3-2100(with 4.00 GB of RAM) personal computer.

• 한국컴퓨터정보학회논문지
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• 제20권7호
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• pp.25-32
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• 2015

In this paper, we propose a license plate detection method of running cars in various road images. The proposed method first classifies the road image into day and night images to improve detection accuracy, and then the tail-light regions are detected by finding red color areas in RGB color space. The candidate regions of the license plate areas are detected by using symmetrical property, size, width and variance of the tail-light regions, and to find the license plate areas of the various sizes the morphological operations with adaptive size structuring elements are applied. Finally, the plate area is verified and confirmed with the geometrical and image features of the license plate areas. The proposed method was tested with the various road images and the detection rates (precisions) of 84.2% of day images and 87.4% of night images were achieved.

• 대한전기학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전기학회 2004년도 심포지엄 논문집 정보 및 제어부문
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• pp.108-110
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• 2004

Automatic license plate recognition (LPR) is one of the critical techniques of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), in which license plate location plays an important role. In this paper, through surveying the international existing techniques, a new method for locating license plate is proposed: utilize row scan method to locate up and down boundary of the plate; and based on the location of up and down boundary, take advantage of the feature of plate area to locate left and right boundary of the plate. The tests of using the proposed algorithms have been conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches are reasonable and accurate.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제13권12호
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• pp.5990-6008
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• 2019

Recognizing license plate from its traffic camera captured images is one of the most important aspects in many traffic management systems. Despite many sophisticated license plate recognition related algorithms available online, license plate recognition is still a hot research issue because license plates in each country all round the world lack of uniform format and their camera captured images are often affected by multiple adverse factors, such as low resolution, poor illumination effects, installation problem etc. A novel method is proposed in this paper to solve the inclination problem of license plates in their camera captured images through four parts: Firstly, special edge pixels of license plate are chosen to represent main information of license plates. Secondly, least square methods are used to compute the inclined angle of license plates. Then, coordinate rotation methods are used to rotate the license plate. At last, bilinear interpolation methods are used to improve the performance of license plate rotation. Several experimental results demonstrated that our proposed method can solve the inclination problem about license plate in visual aspect and can improve the recognition rate when used as the image preprocessing method.