• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.3188-3207
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose an image enhancement algorithm to improve license plate extraction rate in various environments (Day Street, Night Street, Underground parking lot, etc.). The proposed algorithm is composed of image enhancement algorithm and license plate extraction algorithm. The image enhancement method can improve an image quality of the degraded image, which utilizes a histogram information and overall gray level distribution of an image. The proposed algorithm employs an interpolated probability distribution value (PDV) in order to control a sudden change in image brightness. Probability distribution value can be calculated using cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF) of the captured image, whose values are achieved by brightness distribution of the captured image. Also, by adjusting the image enhancement factor of each part region based on image pixel information, it provides a function that can adjust the gradation of the image in more details. This processed gray image is converted into a binary image, which fuses narrow breaks and long thin gulfs, eliminates small holes, and fills gaps in the contour by using morphology operations. Then license plate region is detected based on aspect ratio and license plate size of the bound box drawn on connected license plate areas. The images have been captured by using a video camera or a personal image recorder installed in front of the cars. The captured images have included several license plates on multilane roads. Simulation has been executed using OpenCV and MATLAB. The results show that the extraction success rate is more improved than the conventional algorithms.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1188-1194
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• 2018

This paper proposes an image enhancement-based license plate detection algorithm to improve the overall performance of system. Non-uniform illumination conditions have huge impact on overall plate detection system accuracy. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for color image enhancement-based license plate detection for improving accuracy of images degraded by excessively strong and low sunlight. Firstly, the image is enhanced by Multi-Scale Retinex algorithm. Secondly, a plate detection method is employed to take advantage of geometric properties of connected components, which can significantly reduce the undesired plate regions. Finally, intersection over union method is applied for detecting the accurate location of number plate. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of plate detection system.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.453-462
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• 2021

A lot of license plate data is required for car number recognition. License plate data needs to be balanced from past license plates to the latest license plates. However, it is difficult to obtain data from the actual past license plate to the latest ones. In order to solve this problem, a license plate recognition study through deep learning is being conducted by creating a synthetic license plates. Since the synthetic data have differences from real data, and various data augmentation techniques are used to solve these problems. Existing data augmentation simply used methods such as brightness, rotation, affine transformation, blur, and noise. In this paper, we apply a style transformation method that transforms synthetic data into real-world data styles with data augmentation methods. In addition, real license plate data are noisy when it is captured from a distance and under the dark environment. If we simply recognize characters with input data, chances of misrecognition are high. To improve character recognition, in this paper, we applied the DeblurGANv2 method as a quality improvement method for character recognition, increasing the accuracy of license plate recognition. The method of deep learning for license plate detection and license plate number recognition used YOLO-V5. To determine the performance of the synthetic license plate data, we construct a test set by collecting our own secured license plates. License plate detection without style conversion recorded 0.614 mAP. As a result of applying the style transformation, we confirm that the license plate detection performance was improved by recording 0.679mAP. In addition, the successul detection rate without image enhancement was 0.872, and the detection rate was 0.915 after image enhancement, confirming that the performance improved.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.17-26
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• 2012

This paper presents an image processing-based validation method for unrecognizable numbers in severely distorted license plate images which have been degraded by various factors including low-resolution, low light-level, geometric distortion, and periodic noise. Existing vehicle license plate recognition (LPR) methods assume that most of the image degradation factors have been removed before performing the recognition of printed numbers and letters. If this is not the case, conventional LPR becomes impossible. The proposed method adopts a novel approach where a set of reference number images are intentionally degraded using the same factors estimated from the input image. After a series of image processing steps, including geometric transformation, super-resolution, and filtering, a comparison using cross-correlation between the intentionally degraded reference and the input images can provide a successful identification of the visually unrecognizable numbers. The proposed method makes it possible to validate numbers in a license plate image taken under low light-level conditions. In the experiment, using an extended set of test images that are unrecognizable to human vision, the proposed method provides a successful recognition rate of over 95%, whereas most existing LPR methods fail due to the severe distortion.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.1278-1290
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• 2008

This paper proposes a preprocessing method and a neural network based character recognizer to enhance the overall performance of the license plate recognition system. First, plate outlines are extracted by virtual line matching, and then the 4 vertexes are obtained by calculating intersecting points of extracted lines. By these vertexes, plate image is reconstructed as rectangle-shaped image by bilinear transform. Finally, the license plate is recognized by the neural network based classifier which had been trained using delta-bar-delta algorithm. Various license plate images were used in the experiments, and the proposed plate normalization enhanced the recognition performance up to 16 percent.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.9-16
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• 2012

The research of vehicle license plate recognition has been widely studied for the smart city project. The license plate recognition can be hard due to the geometric distortion and the image quality degradation in case of capturing the driving car image at CCTV without trigger signal on the road. In this paper, the high performance vehicle license plate recognition system using edge-based segment image is introduced which is robust in the geometric distortion and the image quality degradation according to non-trigger signal. The experimental results of the proposed real time license plate recognition algorithm which is implemented at the CCTV on the road show that the plate detection rate was 97.5% and the overall character recognition rate of the detected plates was 99.3% in a day average 1,535 vehicles for a week operation.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2016

We propose an adaptive histogram stretching algorithm for application to a car's personal recorder. The algorithm was used for pre-processing to detect the license plate region in an image from a personal recorder. The algorithm employs a Probability Density Function (PDF) and Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) to analyze the distribution diagram of the images. These two functions are calculated using an image obtained by sampling at a certain pixel interval. The images were subjected to different levels of stretching, and experiments were done on the images to extract their characteristics. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides less deterioration than conventional algorithms. Moreover, contrast is enhanced according to the characteristics of the image. The algorithm could provide better performance than existing algorithms in applications for detecting search regions for license plates.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.71-77
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a learning based super resolution algorithm using local block for image enhancement of vehicle license plate. Local block is defined as the minimum measure of block size containing the associative information in the image. Proposed method essentially generates appropriate local block sets suitable for various imaging conditions. In particular, local block training set is first constructed as ordered pair between high resolution local block and low resolution local block. We then generate low resolution local block training set of various size and blur conditions for matching to all possible blur condition of vehicle license plates. Finally, we perform association and merging of information to reconstruct into enhanced form of image from training local block sets. Representative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.