• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1649-1657
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• 2008

In this paper, to overcome the failure of binarization for the characters suffered from low contrast and non-uniform illumination in license plate character recognition system, we improved the binarization method by combining local thresholding with global thresholding and edge detection. Firstly, apply the local thresholding method to locate the characters in the license plate image and then get the threshold value for the character based on edge detector. This method solves the problem of local low contrast and non-uniform illumination. Finally, back-propagation Neural Network is selected as a powerful tool to perform the recognition process. The results of the experiments i1lustrate that the proposed binarization method works well and the selected classifier saves the processing time. Besides, the character recognition system performed better recognition accuracy 95.7%, and the recognition speed is controlled within 0.3 seconds.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2008

In this paper we propose an algorithm to extract the license plate regions from Korean car images. The idea of this paper is that we first find the four digits in the input car image and then segment the plate region using the digit information. Out method has advantage of segmenting simultaneously the plate regions and four digits regions. The first step finds and groups the connected components with proper sizes as candidate digits. The second step applies an serial alignment condition to find out probable 4-digits. In the third step, we recognize the candidate digits and assign the confidence values to each of them. The final step extracts the license plate region which has the highest confidence value. We used the Perfect Metrics classification algorithm to estimate the confidence. In our experiment, we got 97.23% and 95.45% correct detection rates, 0.09% and 0.11% false detection rates for 4,600 daytime and 264 nighttime images, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.8
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• pp.89-96
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• 2017

This Paper proposes a vehicle detection system and a license plate recognition system from CCTV images installed on public roads. Since the environment of this system acquires the image in the general road environment, the stable condition applied to the existing vehicle entry / exit system is not given, and the input image is distorted and the resolution is irregular. At the same time, the viewing angle of the input image is more wide, so that the computation load is high and the recognition accuracy of the plate is likely to be lowered. In this paper, we propose an improved method to detect and recognize a license plate without a separate input control devices. The vehicle and license plate were detected based on the HOG feature descriptor, and the characters inside the license plate were recognized using the k-NN algorithm. Experimental environment was set up for the roads more than 45m away from the CCTV, Experiments were carried out on an entry vehicle capable of visually identifying license plate and Experimental results show good results of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.160-164
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• 2005

The process of recognizing a vehicle involves detection of the vehicle, recognition of the vehicle model, and identification of the vehicle. The process of vehicle identification involves identification of the vehicle itself, such as by recognition of the license plate on the vehicle. In this paper the method involves the use of a beam splitter to divide incident rays into two directions, a transmitted beam and a reflected beam of different light intensities, and synthesizing two captured images using CCD devices from each beam, thus producing fluctuation-free images of a wide dynamic range even when the subject is moving. A prototype license plate recognition system was also developed using the experimental sensing device. The system achieved a 98.7% recognition rate on 466 images of moving vehicles, which demonstrates its effectiveness as a license plate recognition system.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.31-37
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• 2001

License plate recognition system for an exclusive bus-lane is made of 5 core parts which are vehicle detection, image acquisition individual character extraction, character recognition and data transmission. Among them, the accuracy of license plate extraction can bring effect significantly to the accuracy of a whole system recognition rate also the more exact extraction of license plate is required in various weather and environment conditions. Therefore in this paper we propose a plat extraction algorithm that makes pyramid structure to reduced the extraction processing time binarizes plate's template region using adaptive thresholding extracts candidate region containing plate, and verifies a final region using plate character distribution characteristics among the candidates. Experimenal results were exactly extracted the license plate region by using proposed method to the image obtained in an exclusive bus-lane with various weather and environment conditions.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.29-35
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• 2021

License plate recognition plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems. Therefore, it is a very important process to efficiently detect the number and character areas. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively detect license plate number area by applying deep learning and semantic image segmentation algorithm. The proposed method is an algorithm that detects number and text areas directly from the license plate without preprocessing such as pixel projection. The license plate image was acquired from a fixed camera installed on the road, and was used in various real situations taking into account both weather and lighting changes. The input images was normalized to reduce the color change, and the deep learning neural networks used in the experiment were Vgg16, Vgg19, ResNet18, and ResNet50. To examine the performance of the proposed method, we experimented with 500 license plate images. 300 sheets were used for learning and 200 sheets were used for testing. As a result of computer simulation, it was the best when using ResNet50, and 95.77% accuracy was obtained.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.40-47
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• 2009

This paper proposes a method for vehicle license plate detection using mathematical morphology and symmetry. In general, the shape, color, size, and position of license plate are regulated by authorities for a better recognition by human. Among them, the relatively big intensity difference between the letter and the background region of the license plate and the symmetry about the plate are major discriminating factors for the detection. For the first, the opened image is subtracted from the closed image to intensify the region of plate using the rectangular structuring element which has the width of the distance between two characters. Second the subtraction image is average filtered with the mask size of the plate. Third, the column maximum graph of the average filtered image is acquired and the symmetry of the graph is measured at every position. Fourth, the peaks of the average filtered image are searched. Finally, the plate is assumed to be positioned around the one of local maxima nearest to the point of the highest symmetry. About 1,000 images taken by speed regulation camera are used for the experiment. The experimental result shows that the plate detection rate is about 93%.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2011

Automatic vehicle license plate recognition technology is widely used in gate control and parking control of vehicles, and police enforcement of illegal vehicles. However inherent geometric information of the license plate can be transformed in the vehicle images due to the slant and the sunlight or lighting environment. In this paper, a distortion invariant vehicle license plate extraction and recognition algorithm is proposed. First, a binary image reserving clean character strokes can be achieved by using a DoG filter. A plate area can be extracted by using the location of consecutive digit numbers that reserves distortion invariant characteristic. License plate is recognized by using neural networks after geometric distortion correction and image enhancement. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm show that the accuracy is 98.4% and the average speed is 0.05 seconds in the recognition of 6,200 vehicle images that are obtained by using commercial LPR system.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.9
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• pp.361-368
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• 2014

The LPR(License plate recognition) system has been developed to efficient control for complex traffic environment and currently be used in many places. However, because of light, noise, background changes, environmental changes, damaged plate, it only works limited environment, so it is difficult to use in real-time. This paper presents a heuristic segmentation algorithm for robust to noise and illumination changes and introduce a real-time license plate recognition system using it. In first step, We detect the plate utilized Haar-like feature and Adaboost. This method is possible to rapid detection used integral image and cascade structure. Second step, we determine the type of license plate with adaptive histogram equalization, bilateral filtering for denoise and segment accurate character based on adaptive threshold, pixel projection and associated with the prior knowledge. The last step is character recognition that used histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and multi-layer perceptron(MLP) for number recognition and support vector machine(SVM) for number and Korean character classifier respectively. The experimental results show license plate detection rate of 94.29%, license plate false alarm rate of 2.94%. In character segmentation method, character hit rate is 97.23% and character false alarm rate is 1.37%. And in character recognition, the average character recognition rate is 98.38%. Total average running time in our proposed method is 140ms. It is possible to be real-time system with efficiency and robustness.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.19-26
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• 2022

With the recent development of intelligent transportation systems, car license plate recognition systems are being used in various fields. Such systems need to guarantee real-time performance to recognize the license plate of a driving car. Also, they should keep a high recognition rate even in problematic situations such as small license plates in low-resolution and unclear image due to distortion. In this paper, we propose a real-time car license plate recognition system that improved processing speed using object detection algorithm based on anchor-free method and text recognition algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Network(CNN). In addition, we used Spatial Transformer Network to increase the recognition rate on the low resolution or distorted images. We confirm that the proposed system is faster than previously existing car license plate recognition systems and maintains a high recognition rate in a variety of environment and quality images because the proposed system's recognition rate is 93.769% and the processing speed per image is about 0.006 seconds.