License plate recognition.

International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE)
ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-2, Issue-4, March 2013

An Approach towards Detection of Indian
Number Plate from Vehicle
Sourav Roy, Amitava Choudhury, Joydeep Mukherjee

Abstract—Vehicle number plate recognition is the most
interesting and challenging research topic from past few
years. It is shown that the number plates are different
shape and size and also have different color in different
countries. In India the most common vehicle number plate
used yellow or while as background and black used as
foreground color. In this paper we proposed a system to
Figure 1.1-sample of Number plate
localization of number plate mainly for the vehicles in
West Bengal (India) and segmented the numbers as to From the figure 1.1, 1 indicates the Country code, 2
identify each number separately. This paper presents an indicate the state code, and 3 indicate the district code, 4
approach based on simple and efficient morphological indicate the type of vehicle and 5 indicates the actual
operation and sobel edge detection method. We also registration number. Locating the number plate is very
presents a simple approach to segmented all the letters and challenging work in the field of image processing. The
numbers used in the number plate. After reducing noise whole system mainly consists of two steps. First to identify
from the input image we try to enhance the contrast of the the position of the number plate from the particular vehicle
binarized image using histogram equalization. We mainly and then segmentation of all the numbers and letters of the
concentrate on two steps; one is to locate the number plate number plate. The identification task is challenging because
and second is to segment all the number and letters to of the nature of the light. The location error will increasing
identify each number separately. The project develops by if the color of the number plate is very similar to the
using MATLAB7.4.0. background. Noise on the number plates some time cause of
error and low acuracy. There are some limitation that led to
Keywords—Number plate localization, Morphological failure in most practical appliction due to the diversity of the
operation, Character segmentation, Thresholding, Edge number plate characteristics and the complexity of the
detection. natural environment like rain, snow, for etc.
In this paper, we proposed a method mainly based on
I. INTRODUCTION edge detection and morphological operation and reduce the
Vehicle number plate Identification (VNPI) is a part of noise using mid-filtering noiseremoval method.
digital image processing which broadly used in vehicle
transportation system to identify the vehicle. Number plate II. RELATED WORK
recognition systems have wide range of application such as Many plate detection, segmentation algorithm have been
traffic maintenances, tracing stolen cars, automatic proposed to implement VNPI system. Number plate
electronic Toll collection system and many more. But the detection algorithm can mainly classify into three classes:
main aim is to control the traffic management system. In edge-based, color base and texture based.
State like West Bengal (India) the traffic management The most popular method used for license plate
system developing day by day. In India the number plate identification is described by Dening Jiang, Tulu Muluneh,
containing white background with black foreground color Tiruneh Embiale, Ashenafi Gebrehiwot in “Car Plate
for private cars and for the commercial vehicle used yellow Recognition System” [1].
as background and black as foreground color. The number Hulli Hsan and Runping Han proposed a method to
plate start with two digit letter “state code” followed by two extract number plate to location based on the edge detection
digit numeral followed by single letter after those four and color information [2].
consecutive digits as the below figure1.1. Ch. Jaya Lakshmi, Dr. A. Jhansi Rani, Dr K.Sri
Ramakrishna, M. kanti Kiran and V.R Siddhartha proposed
a novel approach for Indian license plate recognition system.
[3].
License plate location algorithm based on edge Detection
and morphology are describe in [4] [5] [6] [7].
To locate the number plate its first to identify whether any
Manuscript received March, 2013. noise added to the plate. This noise may be the part of
Sourav Roy, perusing his M.Tech degree from School of Education outside environment. Seyed Hamidreza Mohades Kasaei and
Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata..
Amitava Choudhury, perusing his M.Tech degree from School of Sayed mohammadreza Mohades Kasaei proposed a method
Education Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.. to extracting and recognize the vehicle number plate for
Joydeep Mukherjee, obtained M.Tech degree from Jadavpur passing under outside environment [8].
University. Currently he works as a Asst. Prof. in School of Education An efficient method of locating vehicle license plate is
Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His research interests comprise
of Digital image processing, Character Recognition, Pattern Recognition..
proposed by Zhigang Xu and Honglei Zhu [9].

241

An Approach towards Detection of Indian Number Plate from Vehicle

Several segmentation and recognition method are used to C. Noise reduction
number plate segmentation [10]. More correct and efficient We used median filtering technique to reduce the paper
segmentation [11] of number plate will produce good and and salt noise. We have used 3x 3 masks to get eight
more efficient recognition. neighbors of a pixel and their corresponding gray value.
Based on the above mentioned method, many number
plate localization algorithms have been developed. In this D. Contrast enhancement using histogram equalization.
paper, an improved and efficient approach is identified with Using histogram equalization technique the contrast of
high detection rate based on sobel edge detection and each image is being enhanced. The function used to
morphological operation. enhancement that is
J=histeq(k); histeq enhances the contrast of the images
III. PROPOSED METHOD by transforming the values in an intensity image.
Number plate is a pattern with very high variations of When image pixel intensity of 8-neibourgh connectivity,
contrast. If the number plate is very similar to background we supply a desired histogram, histeq chooses the grayscale
it‟s difficult to identify the location. Brightness and contrast transformation T to minimize
is changes as light fall changes to it. In this paper the │c1 (T (k))-c0 (k) │
morphological operations are used to extract the contrast In below we state the change of histogram from original
feature within the plate. image (Figure 2.3) and after applying the contrast
The work is divided into several parts: enhancement using histogram equalization (Figure 2.4).
A. Input raw image
B. Image binarization
C. Reduce noise using mid-filtering method
D. Enhance contrast using histogram equalizer.
E. Plate localization
F. Character segmentation

Figure2.1 shows the basic step diagram of our proposed
method.

Figure2.3- Before contrast enhancement

Figure 2.1- Block diagram of proposed approach.
A. Input raw image
Input the image that is taken from the car [Figure 2.2].

Figure2.4- After contrast enhancement.
E. Plate localization
The basic step in recognition of vehicle number plate is to
detect the plate size. In general number plates are
rectangular in shape. Hence we have to detect the edges of
the rectangular plate. Mathematical morphology will be
used to detect that region. Using Sobel edge detector we
used to high light regions with a high edge magnitude and
high edge variance are identified. Depending upon the
Figure: 2.2- input car image threshold value edge will be detected from the input image.
B. Gray scale conversion Figure 2.5 shows the input image before applying Sobel
From the input RGB image it has to be convert to gray edge detection algorithm and figure 2.6 shows after applying
scale and the 8-bit gray value is calculated. the Sobel edge detection method.

242

International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE)
ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-2, Issue-4, March 2013
Matlab toolbox function provide a function
imfill(BE,‟holes‟) that fills holes in the binarized image
called BW. The set of background pixels are known as hole
that cannot be reached by filling the background from the
edge of the image. Figure 2.8 shows after remove lower
pixels connected components fills the holes

Figure: 2.5- Grayscale image after image enhancing.

Figure: 2.8- After filling the „holes‟
Using flood fill algorithm we fill the hole to locate the
plate region. Now omitting the lower pixel components to
gets the actual plate.
Algorithm:
for m=2:p-1
for n=2:q-1
if(In(m,n)>0)
c=Connectivity(H3,m,n);
if(c>2)
In(m,n)=1;
else
In(m,n)=0;
end
Figure: 2.6- After applying „Sobel‟ edge detection method end
end
After edge detection removes all connected components end
that have lower than p(eight pixel in our method) pixels. Connecting edges will be removes in figure2.9
Thus it will produce another binary image [2.7]
Algorithm:
1. Determine the connected components.
L= bwlabeln(BW,conn);

2. Compute the area of each component.
S= regionprops(L,‟Area‟);

3. Remove small objects
Bw2 =
ismember(L,find([S.Area] >= p));
Figure: 2.9- image after removing components with
Figure 2.5 shows the shows the input image after removing connectivity less than 1000 pixel
the connected component fewer than 8 pixels. Using Matlab toolbox function bwareaopen() that
specifies the desired connectivity. All components
connectivity lower than 1000 pixel are removed to get the
actual location of the number plate [Figure 2.10].

Figure: 2.10- Locate the number plate after morphological
filtering.
Figure: 2.7-After removing lower pixels.

243

An Approach towards Detection of Indian Number Plate from Vehicle

We output the four vertexes coordinates of the last selected
region after morphological filtering and extract the number
plate [Figure: 2.11].

Figure: 3.3 More lights on background than the number
plate

Figure: 2.11- License plate before crop

The final positioning of the number plate after cropping
[Figure2.12]. Figure: 3.4-Problem in distinguishing the actual plate
position due to light.

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper, an efficient less time consuming vehicle
Figure: 2.12- The final number plate after the positioning. number plate detection method is proposed which performed
F. Character Segmentation on complex image. By using, Sobel edge detection method
here detects edges and fills the holes less than 8 pixels only.
Matlab toolbox function provides a function called
To extracting the license plate we remove connected
regionprops(). It measures a set of properties for each
components less than 1000 pixels. Our proposed algorithm
labeled region in the label matrix. We use boundingbox to
is mainly based on Indian automobile number plate system.
measure the properties of the image region. After labeling
Extraction of number plate accuracy may be increased for
the connecting components, the region will be extracting
low ambient light image.
from the input image [Figure: 2.13].
REFERENCES
[1] Deniing Jiang, Tulu Muluneh Mekonnen, Tiruneth Embiale,Ashenafi
Gebrehiwot “Car Plate Tecognition System” in Fifth internation
Figure 2.13- Segmentation of characters conference on Intelligent Networks and Intelligent Systems, IEEE,
978-0-7695-4855-5/12 2012.
[2] Huili Han, Runping Han “Method of License plate Location Based on
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Edge Detection and Color Information”, IEEE, 978-1-4577-1701-
7/11, 2011, pp1477-1480.
We have run our proposed method on desktop computer [3] Ch. Jaya Lakshmi, Dr A.Jhansi Rani, Dr. K. Sri Ramakrishna,
with Core2 due processor 2.26 MHz with 1 GB of RAM M.Lantikiran, V.R. Siddhartha,”A novel Approach for Indian License
under MATLAB R2007a environment. Several vehicle Plate Recognition System”, IJAEST, Vol 2 Issue I, 2011, pp 010-014.
[4] Shokri Gendy, Clifton L.Smith, Stefan Lachowicz, “Automatic Car
images are captured using 1.3 mega pixel camera as well as registration Plate Using Fast Hough Transform”, IEEE, 0-7803-3913-
12 mega pixel cameras. In the experiments, we test our 4-9/97,1997, pp 209-218
proposed method on the different type car image to identify [5] P.Anishiya, Prof.S.M ary Joans,”Number Plate Recognition for Indian
Cars Using Morphological Dilation and Erosion with the Aid Of
the location accurately. OCRs”, IACSIT,vol.4, 2011, pp 115-119
[6] Phalgun Pandya, Mandeep Singh, “Morphology based Approach to
Recognize Number Plates in India”, IJSCE, vol.1, issue 3, 2011,
pp107-112.
[7] Thota Sridevi, Chilukuri Sindhu, Pendyala Naga Praveen Kumar,
Perupogu.Sagar, “Morphology based Number Plate Localization for
Vehicular Surveillance System”, IJMER, vol.2, issue.2, 2012, pp 334-
337.
[8] Seyad Hamidreza Mohades Kasaei, Seyad Mohammadreza Mohades
Kasaei, “Extraction and Recognition of the vehicle License Plate for
passing Under Outside Environment”, IEEE, pp 234-237
[9] Zhigang Xu, Honglei Zhu, “An Efficient Method of Locating Vehicle
Licence Plate”, 3rd International conference on Natural Computetion,
IEEE, 0-7695-2875-9/07, 2007.
[10] Hanchuan Peng, Fuhui Long, Zheru Chi,”Document Inage
Fig: 3.1-Proper light on Fig 3.2-Successful Recognition Based on Template Matching of Component Block
cropping. number plate. Projection”, IEEE Transactions ON pattern Analysis and machine
Intelligence, vol 25, No9 september 2003.
[11] R. C. Gonzalez, and R. E. Woods and S.I.Eddins Digital Image
Processing using MATLAB.Pearson Education, 2008.

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