• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.40-48
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• 2018

This paper proposes a license-plate recognition algorithm for automobile black-box image which is obtained from the camera moving with the automobile. The algorithm intends to increase the overall recognition-rate of the license-plate by increasing the Korean character recognition-rate using multi-stage neural network for automobile black-box image where there are many movements of the camera and variations of light intensity. The proposed algorithm separately recognizes the vowel and consonant of Korean characters of automobile license-plate. First, the first-stage neural network recognizes the vowels, and the recognized vowels are classified as vertical-vowels('ㅏ','ㅓ') and horizontal-vowels('ㅗ','ㅜ'). Then the consonant is classified by the second-stage neural networks for each vowel group. The simulation for automobile license-plate recognition is performed for the image obtained by a real black-box system, and the simulation results show the proposed algorithm provides the higher recognition-rate than the existing algorithms using a neural network.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.8
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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.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1995.07b
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• pp.1002-1005
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• 1995

This paper presents an enhanced preprocessing and recognition algorithm for automatic vehicle license plate recognition system. The algorithm first applies horizontal gradient filter followed by thresholding and mathematical morphology operation for preprocessing. The final stage of the preprocessing is the application of connected component analysis in order to estimate the license plate region. For the recognition of the serial numbers of the plates, we developed a very effective algorithm. We call this zerocrossing count algorithm. This paper presents a detail of this algorithm and compare the performance with a template matching algorithm which utilizes correlation coefficient.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-11
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• 2022

Recently, research on license plate recognition, which is a core technology of an intelligent transportation system(ITS), is being actively conducted. In this paper, we propose a method to extract numbers and characters from low-quality license plate images by applying the YOLOv4 algorithm. YOLOv4 is a one-stage object detection method using convolution neural network including BACKBONE, NECK, and HEAD parts. It is a method of detecting objects in real time rather than the previous two-stage object detection method such as the faster R-CNN. In this paper, we studied a method to directly extract number and character regions from low-quality license plate images without additional edge detection and image segmentation processes. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method we experimented with 500 license plate images. In this experiment, 350 images were used for training and the remaining 150 images were used for the testing process. Computer simulations show that the mean average precision of detecting number and character regions on vehicle license plates was about 93.8%.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.166-171
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• 2009

In recent years, video detection systems have been implemented in various infrastructures such as airport, public transportation, power generation system, water dam and so on. Recognizing moving objects in video sequence is an important problem in computer vision, with applications in several fields, such as video surveillance and target tracking. Segmentation and tracking of multiple vehicles in crowded situations is made difficult by inter-object occlusion. In the system described in this paper, the mean shift algorithm is firstly used to filter and segment a color vehicle image in order to get candidate regions. These candidate regions are then analyzed and classified in order to decide whether a candidate region contains a license plate or not. And then some characters in the license plate is recognized by using the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network, which is a relatively new architecture of the neural network family and has the capability to learn incrementally unlike the conventional BP network. We finally design a license plate recognition system using the mean shift algorithm and fuzzy ARTMAP neural network and show its performance via some computer simulations.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 1996

Two different methods to extract the license plate area of a vehicle have been used for automatic recognition purposes. One method is with a color vision system and the other is with an edge detecting operator. The system with color vision has some problems if the colors of license plate and vehicle's body are similar. The various plate colors in Korea also drops the system performance. The edge detecting operator also has a problem for a real time processing since it performs on all pixels of the scene. In this paper a possible method using gray level vision system and available pre-known information of license plates is suggested. The suggested procedure searches the lower boundary of the plate by counting high contrast points between one and near pixel from the bottom line of the scene. It finds the upper boundary from the bottom line by adding number plate height after finding the lower boundary. The left and right boundaries are found by similar processes.

• 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.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1249-1253
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• 2003

License plate recognition is very important in an automobile society. This is because, since plate detection accuracy has large influence on subsequent number recognition, it is very important. However, it is very difficult to do it, because a background and a body color of cars are similar to that of the license plate. In this paper, we propose a new thresholds determination method in the various background by using the real-coded genetic algorithm (RGA). By using RGA, the most likely plate colors are decided under various lighting conditions. First, the average brightness Y values of images are calculated. Next, relationship between the Y value and the most likely plate color thresholds (upper and lower bounds)are obtained by RGA. The relationship between thresholds decided from RGA and brightness average is aproximate by using the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm. In the case of plate detection, thresholds are decided from these functions.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2004

In this paper, we proposed a vehicle recognition and electronic toll collection system with detection and classification of vehicle identification mark and emblem as well as recognition of vehicle license plate to unman toll fee collection system or incoming/outcoming vehicles to an institution. In the proposed algorithm, we first process pre-processing step such as noise reduction and thinning from the rear side input image of vehicle and detect vehicle mark, emblem and license plate region using intensity variation informations, template masking and labeling operation. And then, we classify the detected vehicle features regions into vehicle mark and emblem as well as recognize characters and numbers of vehicle license plate using hybrid and seven segment pattern vector. To show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, we tested it on real vehicle images of implemented vehicle recognition system in highway toll gate and found that the proposed method shows good feature detection/classification performance regardless of irregular environment conditions as well as noise, size, and location of vehicles. And also, the proposed algorithm may be utilized for catching criminal vehicles, unmanned toll collection system, and unmanned checking incoming/outcoming vehicles to an institution.