• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39C no.10
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• pp.909-919
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• 2014

License plate (LP) detection is the most imperative part of an automatic LP recognition (LPR) system. Typical LPR contains two steps, namely LP detection (LPD) and character recognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient Vehicle-to-LP detection framework which combines with an adaptive GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) and a cascade of boosted classifiers to make a faster vehicle LP detector. To develop a background model by using a GMM is possible in the circumstance of a fixed camera and extracts the motions using background subtraction. Firstly, an adaptive GMM is used to find the region of interest (ROI) on which motion detectors are running to detect the vehicle area as blobs ROIs. Secondly, a cascade of boosted classifiers is executed on the blobs ROIs to detect a LP. The experimental results on our test video with the resolution of $720{\times}576$ show that the LPD rate of the proposed system is 99.14% and the average computational time is approximately 42ms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.2 s.308
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• pp.21-32
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• 2006

The license plate recognition (LPR) unit consists of the following core components: plate region segmentation, individual character extraction, and character recognition. Out of the above three components, accuracy in the performance of plate region segmentation determines the overall recognition rate of the LPR unit. This paper proposes an algorithm for segmenting the license plate region on the front or rear of a vehicle in a fast and accurate manner. In the case of the proposed algorithm images are captured on the spot where unmanned monitoring of illegal parking and stowage is performed with a variety of roadway environments taken into account. As a means of enhancing the segmentation performance of the on-the-spot-captured images of license plate regions, the proposed algorithm uses a mathematical model for license plate colors to convert color images into digital data. In addition, this algorithm uses Gaussian smoothing and double threshold to eliminate image noises, one-pass boundary tracing to do region labeling, and MBR to determine license plate region candidates and extract individual characters from the determined license plate region candidates, thereby segmenting the license plate region on the front or rear of a vehicle through a verification process. This study contributed to addressing the inability of conventional techniques to segment the license plate region on the front or rear of a vehicle where the frame of the license plate is damaged, through processing images in a real-time manner, thereby allowing for the practical application of the proposed algorithm.

• 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%.

• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.713-725
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• 2019

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a technology required for many applications such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and Video Surveillance Systems. Most of the studies have studied were about the detection and recognition of license plates on cars, and there is very little about detecting and recognizing license plates on motorbikes. In the case of a car, the license plate is located at the front or rear center of the vehicle and is a straight or slightly sloped license plate. Also, the background of the license plate is mainly monochromatic, and license plate detection and recognition process is less complicated. However since the motorbike is parked by using a kickstand, it is inclined at various angles when parked, so the process of recognizing characters on the motorbike license plate is more complicated. In this paper, we have developed a 2-stage YOLOv2 algorithm to detect the area of a license plate after detection of a motorbike area in order to improve the recognition accuracy of license plate for motorbike data set parked at various angles. In order to increase the detection rate, the size and number of the anchor boxes were adjusted according to the characteristics of the motorbike and license plate. Image warping algorithms were applied after detecting tilted license plates. As a result of simulating the license plate character recognition process, the proposed method had the recognition rate of license plate of 80.23% compared to the recognition rate of the conventional method(YOLOv2 without image warping) of 47.74%. Therefore, the proposed method can increase the recognition of tilted motorbike license plate character by using the adjustment of anchor boxes and the image warping which fit the motorbike license plate.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.3 no.5
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• pp.511-519
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• 1997

This paper presents the automatic recognition algorithm of the license number in on vehicle image. The proposed algorithm uses the correlation coefficient and Hough transform to detect license plate. The m/n ratio reduction is performed to save time and memory. By the correlation coefficient between the standard pattern and the target pattern, licence plate area is roughly extracted. On the extracted local area, preprocessing and binarization is performed. The Hough transform is applied to find the extract outline of the plate. If the detection fails, a smaller or a larger standard pattern is used to compute the correlation coefficient. Through this process, the license plate of different size can be extracted. Two algorithms to each separate number are proposed. One segments each number with projection-histogram, and the other segments each number with the label. After each character is separated, it is recognized by the neural network. This research overlomes the problems in conventional methods, such as the time requirement or failure in extraction of outlines which are due to the processing of the entire image, and by processing in real time, the practical application is possible.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.12B no.3 s.99
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• pp.257-264
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• 2005

The number of vehicles are rapidly increased as our society is developed. The vehicle recognition has been studied for a while because many people acknowledged it has critical functions to solve the problems of traffic control or vehicle-related crimes. In this paper a novel method is proposed to recognize vehicle models corresponding makers. Vehicles' models are recognized based on the texture parameters from segmented radiator region above a number plate. A three-layer neural network was built and trained with the texture features for recognition. The proposed method shows $93.7\%$ of recognition rate and $99.7\%$ of specificity for vehicles' model.

• 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 IKEEE
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.471-477
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a low-cost license plate recognition system based on smart cam system using Android. The proposed system consists of a portable device and server. Potable device Hardware consists of ARM Cortex-A9 (S5PV210) processor control unit, a power supply device, wired and wireless communication, input/output unit. We develope Linux kernel and dedicated device driver for WiFi module and camera. The license plate recognition algorithm is consisted of setting candidate plates areas with canny edge detector, extracting license plate number with Labeling, recognizing with template matching, etc. The number that is recognized by the device is transmitted to the remote server via the user mobile phone, and the server re-transfer the vehicle information in the database to the portable device. To verify the utility of the proposed system, user photographs the license plate of any vehicle in the natural environment. Confirming the recognition result, the recognition rate was 95%. The proposed system was suitable for low cost portable license plate recognition device, it enabled the stability of the system when used long time by using the Android operating system.

• 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.