Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Materials Today: Proceedings

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/matpr

Automatic recognition of Indian vehicles license plates using machine

learning approaches
Ashok Kumar Sahoo
Graphic Era Hill University, Dehradun, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A proposed method for automation of Indian vehicles number plate conversion is presented in this paper.
Received 26 August 2020 Many vehicles are plying on Indian roads with varying in size and structure and hence there are a number
Accepted 3 September 2020 of variations in number plates too. Although there are strict norms to be followed for number plate
Available online xxxx
designs, however, it can be seen many deviations in actual number plates of many vehicles. It can be also
observed that the number plates are written in many Indian languages, but the prescribed norm is Hindu-
Keywords: Arabic numerals with Latin letters which is prescribed by the licensing plate issuing authority. The num-
Indian vehicle number plate
ber plate designs are varied according to types of vehicles, like, personal, commercial, public transport,
k-nearest neighbor
Decision tree
etc. In order to design an automatic vehicle number plate, considerations of these factors are taken into
Neural network account. The steps in the design include segmentation and character extraction from number plates and
Local histogram recognition of segmented characters in order to extract the complete information from number plates.
Hierarchical centroid The work in this paper is focused on Hindu-Arabic numerals with Latin letters. For feature extraction,
Prewitt filter technique is used to extraction of characters from the vehicle number plates and connected
component analysis is used for segmenting characters. Three different classifiers, namely, k-Nearest
Neighbor, Artificial Neural Network and Decision Tree, are used in the experiments. Recognition accuracy
up to 98.10% is achieved and is a promising factor for future research in this direction.
Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the National Conference on
Functional Materials: Emerging Technologies and Applications in Materials Science.

1. Introduction
Automatic Vehicle Number Plate Recognition (AVNPR) system
[1] is an essential technique that is used in intelligent systems in
transportation systems. Actually, this system uses the progressive
technology of machine vision that uses the number plate of vehi-
cles without any straight forward interference of humans. Because
of its many applications, this is an important area for research
work. The evolution of the intelligent systems is provided by the
data of number plates of the vehicles that can be used for further
reasoning and supervising. There are many important areas where
the AVNPR is used such as in traffic problems for collecting the
tolls on highways, for security at border areas and customs where
there is a need of high security in the premises and so on, when the
number plate is standard then the AVNPR system will not have any
difficulty for reading and recognizing the number plate. As it can be
E-mail address: ashoksahoo2000@yahoo.com
seen in India that there are different models of number plates so it
is difficult task to recognize all types of number plates in India.
The work of AVNPR is generally wrapped into the following
steps: Extract the region of interest of a number plate, segment
characters and recognizing characters followed by the generation
of a string which contains the actual characters in the number
plate of a vehicle. The system captured the image of the number
plate from vehicles which is treated as input image and that can
be used in further processing. In next step, segmentation of charac-
ters is done. In this, every character is segregated and disjointed
according to segmentation algorithm. The character recognition
is done on the basis of choice of the characters of outstanding fea-
tures by using a recognition engine.
2. Literature survey
In Parasuraman, et al [2], the method proposed is for the
recognition of Indian number plates. Images are the only input
for the system which is acquired by a normal digital camera.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.09.046
2214-7853/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the National Conference on Functional Materials: Emerging Technologies and Applications in
Materials Science.

Please cite this article as: A. Kumar Sahoo, Automatic recognition of Indian vehicles license plates using machine learning approaches, Materials Today:
Proceedings, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.09.046
A. Kumar Sahoo
This method consists of following stages: RGB or colored to gray
scale conversion, detection of vertical edges and binarization of
image, analysis and dilation of image, vertical projection and
thresholding, extraction of actual location of the number plate,
apply filters and enhancing the image, binarization and smooth-
ing process and segmentation of characters for horizontal and
vertical division.
In this method, the speedup is achieved in processing of input
images. The colored images are converted to the gray scale images
based on RGB to gray scale conversion technique. Then the resulted
images are converted to the binary images. Binarization is done to
extract the number plate region from the acquired images [3]. The
filtration is used to remove the unnecessary objects from the num-
ber plates. In analysis, it looks for the appropriate size of image, it
calculate the values of height and the width. There are certain fixed
height values, that is, maximum height and minimum height. If the
object height is in the range then the object is retained and other-
wise it removes other object. After that, there are fixed width val-
ues for maximum and minimum width. If the object is in the width
limit then the object is retained otherwise it removes other objects
which are not part of the interest of the system. The process of dila-
tion is used to get the rough location of the number plates. After
getting the accurate location, the extract and only required region
of the number plate from which the starting and ending position of
the number plates are identified.
In Du. et al. [4] in the recognition system of license plate shows
the accuracy of automatic license plate recognition system. They
employed various techniques for license plate extraction, namely,
Boundary/Edge information, global image information, texture fea-
tures, and color features.
As the number plates are usually in rectangular shape with a
known aspect ratio, it can extract the number plate from all the
rectangles that are in the image. It uses the Sobel filters as used
to detect the edges. As there is the difference in color of car body
and number plate, so the boundaries of number plate are shown
by the edges. The outcome of this method yields 96.2% on images
under the various conditions. The Connected Component Analysis
(CCA) technique is used in binary image processing. It scans the
binary image and the pixels of the image are labeled into compo-
nents that are based on pixel connectivity. The texture feature
method depends on the text or the characters that are present on
the number plate, which results the difference in gray scale level
between the colors of the characters and the background color of
the number plate. Some countries have the specific color for their
number plates. By this, the number can be extracted from the
image by locating their respective color.
According to Rajput and Som [5], the method they have fol-
lowed is consisting of three phases, namely, image capture,
license plate localization and number recognition. In image cap-
ture phase, the captured image of the vehicle is normalized. The
standard dimension to normalize an image is 400
300 pixels.
Then the image is converted to the gray scale. In plate localiza-
tion phase, the wavelet decomposition is performed to get the
approximation. The number plate is located by the vertical and
horizontal frequency energies. A Gaussian filter is used to mod-
ify the incoming signal with a Gaussian function. There are
many benefits for using the Gaussian filter as it is rationally
symmetric, there is decrease in variation of filter weights from
the central peak; the central pixels have the highest weight, this
filtering is separable, this means that the filters rotate the image
with one dimensional horizontal filter and after that convolves it
with one dimensional vertical filter.
In the number plate recognition phase, to get the number plate
of gray colored image, the image are converted into black and
white image and sets the pixels intensity in the range of 0 and
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255. After segmentation, the characters are normalized for refine-
ment for no extra white pixels.
The research work by Ram Lingam et al. [6], reports UK number
plates recognition and the misread of number plates. Their work is
based on three defined parameters, failed to capture misreads;
Spacing of characters fro he input required data and character
spacing in real world data.
The automatic number plate recognition system is failed to get
the picture from the camera when the vehicle is moving. The ‘‘mis-
read” is that when the OCR engine has failed to read the number
plate correctly.
There are records of the images that are captured, some of them
are legal and some are illegal. Illegal number plates are those
which have illegal fonts, spacing. So, these numbers are analyzed
from the police data.
In the third phase, they have data from the real world that is they
experimented with two thousand two hundred number plates
which were photographed by a digital camera. They have taken
the data of two major airports car parking and send them to the
police for safety to check them randomly and get the proportion
of legal number plates and the number plate that have the illegal
fonts.
In this research, Chi et al. [7], the input vehicle number plate
image is standardized before processing. Scaling and again evalua-
tion are tested for erasing the exception and ascertain clear speci-
fications for Support Vector Machine (SVM) process. For character
recognition, the SVM process has been used. SVM process have
higher correct detection rate than the neural network systems as
reported in the paper.
Lopez. et al., 2007 [8] designed a system which is suitable in
when the camera is in motion. Pictures are captured through a
standard webcam. The images of different size of number plate
are localized. When the number plate is localized, then the seg-
mentation of the characters in the system is done. For character
recognition, a number of neural network techniques are applied.
The modification rate in these methods is 95%. The University of
Malaga (Spain) implemented this application on the entry gate
of their building of Computer Science Department.
Bo Li. et al in their work have used to detect edges by Sobel
color edge detector technique and after that the false edges are
eliminated. Then the pattern matching search the number plate
region of the vehicle is applied. For analysis the following methods
have been applied, namely, mathematical analysis and connected
component analysis. Neural network and Radial basis function
for character detection have been applied. This system is also use-
ful in night in real environment.
Telatar and Camasircioglu [9] used the background of number
plate of the vehicles and the color of the character with the color
of the vehicle for locating the position of number plate. The column
sum vector is used after segmentation for recognizing characters in
the number plates. In this research, for character detection, Artifi-
cial Neural Network has been applied.
Feng Yang and Fan Yang [10] have designed for system for
Chine number plate detection. This system transformed the num-
ber plate images into the binary images. After that the destructions
in the image are eliminated from the vehicle image. This frame-
work is applied for producing the better quality of the characters
in the number plate. The standard size of the characters 8*16 pixels
is used in the experiments. For recognition of characters, the Back -
Propagation Neural Network is used in experiments after the stan-
dardization of number plate images.
Syed, Y.A. and Sarfraz [11] have applied two scheduled algo-
rithms for vehicle number plate recognition: locating the plate
and plate segmentation schedule. Fuzzy geometry is applied for
the first schedule. The second schedule is the Fuzzy C mean
A. Kumar Sahoo Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx

algorithm. In this method for image segmentation the recognition
percentage was 94.24%.
3. The proposed architecture
Analyzing the shape is the main issue in the recognition of char-
acters in a vehicle number plate. The characters which are seg-
mented are used for the process of recognition. The pattern
matching algorithm is used with computational intelligence and
this automatic vehicle number plate recognition (AVNPR) system
is basically divided into three phases. The detailed work is shown
in Fig. 1.
3.2. Pre-processing step
After collection of database, the pre processing is done on the
images for improving the processing speed, the noise of the images
are reduced to some extent, the pre processing of the images boost
the diversity of the image. The RGB images are firstly, converted
into binary images. After that, filtration is used to remove the
unnecessary objects those are present in the number plates. After
that, the process of dilation is used to get the rough location of
number plates. For edge detection, canny edge detection technique
is used. After getting the accurate location of the number plate,
extract region of the number plates are extracted.

 Extraction of number plate. 3.2.1. Feature Extraction

 Segmenting the characters.
 Recognition of segmented characters.
3.1. Input image of number plate data
The images collected are taken under differing in illumination
conditions, backgrounds, weather conditions and varied distance
of the vehicle from the camera. The camera resolution is up to 16
Mega Pixel, images are captured from the camera and can be
zoomed up to ten times. The captured images are in JPEG format
because this format is light in nature. The database collected is
divided into one thousand images for digits and two thousand
six hundred images for alphabets, that is, hundred images per
input character. A total of three thousand six hundred images are
available in the database. The size of each image is 640
840 pix-
els and an approximate size of 152 KB memory space per image is
required. For designing a better database, the images are resized
into 32
30 pixels and it makes an efficient database. This data-
base has been created from six hundred personal four wheeler
vehicles. After that the database is divided into two sets. One set
is assigned for training and another one is assigned for testing in
the experiments.
The aim of the feature extraction [12-14] step is to identify and
extract the geometrical or structural features from the images in
order to provide them for further processing. As the input images
are characters A-Z and digits 0–9, therefore a total of thirty six dif-
ferent characters are used. Each character, whether a digit or an
alphabet, is different from each other. The work of the feature
extraction step is to extract the feature of any character which is
distinguishable from features of other characters. This is also
known as dimensionality reduction step because an image is con-
verted into a one dimensional feature vector. The direct pixel value,
local histogram and hierarchical centroid feature extraction tech-
niques have been employed in the experiments and are described
in the next section.
3.3. Extraction of number plate
The crucial step in the process of AVNPR system is to extract the
number plate from the image that has been captured from the
vehicle itself. The results show the effect on the efficiency of the
system. The objective of this stage is when an image is taken as
an input then the assignment is to find the number plate and verify
the accurate number plate.

3.4. Image procurement

Input Image of Number Plate
In the AVNPR system, for acquiring the image, a digital camera
that is of high resolution is used. Different illuminations conditions
are used for taking the image, different backgrounds are used for
capturing images. Grayscale images are used for further processing
Pre-Processing Step steps. As the images contain noise; for reducing the noise, to make
the contrast better and boosting the processing speed; histogram
RGB Edge Detection equalization is used for enhancing the image as there are problem
of contrast and quality of image that is low.

3.5. Vertical edge detection

Feature Extraction Step
The number plate has the printed characters on it and those
Pixel Value Local Histogram Hierarchical Cent.
characters have plenty of edges in comparison of the rest of the
area of image. The area of candidate plate has been located from
the input image and this is employed by this component [1]. For
finding the regions, Prewitt edge detection technique is used which
Classification Techniques gives the high value pixel variance. Threshold technique is used for
extracting the area of number plate from the whole image.
kNN Decision Tree Neural Network
3.6. Candidate plate area detection

For removing the unwanted matter from the image, morpholog-

Output ical process is used. For extracting the candidate area from the
(Text Extracted from Images) number plate, dilation and erosion techniques are used. It is possi-
ble that area of background is also included in the area of candidate
Fig. 1. The proposed architecture for automatic vehicle number plate recognition plate; therefore, for removing the false candidate plate, validation
system. by the aspect ratio of plate is used.
3
A. Kumar Sahoo
3.7. Character segmentation
The segregation of characters from the region of number plate
in the AVNPR system is an essential step; it has a great impact
on accuracy of characters recognition. The main objective of this
section is segmenting the number plate characters and the charac-
ters did not lose its features of character region enhancement, con-
nected component analysis is the operations that are performed in
this section.
3.8. Character region enhancement
For segmenting the characters, the region of characters should
be enhanced and for this histogram equalization (also known as
gray level scaling) is used. By application of enhancement of region
of characters, there is also enhancement in noise [2]. For segment-
ing the correct characters, only character pixel are needed and can
enhance, however, the pixels of background remained to be
depleted.
3.9. Connected component analysis
This technique is used for the elimination of noise from the
number plate leaving characters unaffected. Threshold area is used
for the evaluation of pixels that are labeled by a matrix of eight-
connectivity.
3.10. Character recognition
For recognition of characters two steps are followed;
a) Normalization of characters and feature extraction.
b) Character classification using Neural Network, k-Nearest
Neighbor and Distance tree classifier.
The sizes of the characters having much variation in segmented
through normalization of character. Each character had been nor-
malized by image mapping technique to the size of 60
60. Fea-
ture extraction is the technique that can transform the large
processed input data into a featured set that is reduced in quantity.
The features that are extracted must contain the proper informa-
tion from the input data. Therefore, the task can be completed by
using the required reduced data instead of using the complete data
that is available initially.
4. Direct pixel
The image that is stored in the computer or the system has been
represented by the pixels; those pixels have some numerical value
which is used to describe the image. It tells about the brightness of
the pixel and tells about the color of the pixel. When binary images
are considered, the value of pixel is one bit number and for the gray
scale images the value of pixel shows the brightness that is the sin-
gle number of the pixel. The range of the possible pixel values lies
between ‘‘0E” to ‘‘255”. Actually, the zero is considered as black
and 255 is considered as white and the in between values lies
are considered to be the different shades of grayscale. The color
image is made up of three components, i.e., red component, green
component and blue component (RGB) and the value is the vector
of these three planes. The image is made up of the large number of
pixels. More the number of pixels, more the image is clear, large
number of pixels reduces the blurrness of the image and the image
having less number of pixels is not cleared image or it is a blur
image.
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Mathematically total number of pixels can be calculated as the
product of number of rows and the number of columns. These two
dimensional pixels are converted into one dimensional data and is
used as feature vector representing that image.
5. Local histogram
Histogram [13] is the visual display of the numeric value or
data. To design a histogram, the initial step is to ‘‘bin” the domain
of the values, i.e., the domain should be divided into the fixed
intervals, after that calculation is required to put how much data
into each interval. Usually, the bins are specified as successive,
one after another interval. These intervals are of same size.
Histogram Equalization is used extensively for contrast
improvement method. The contrast of the complete image has
been improved by the global histogram, most of the times many
of the images are improved by the local histogram by taking the
information of various forms of the same type of gray level at dis-
tinct areas in the authentic image. Basically, the mechanism of
local histogram gives the conclusion which has inadmissible cor-
rection of the appearance of the authentic image.
Suppose ‘‘f” is taken for representing the image as a ma
mb
matrix that shows the intensities of pixel that ranging from 0 to
N-1. Where ’N’ is the number of intensity values that are possible,
can be up to 256. Suppose ’p’ is used to express the established his-
togram of ‘‘f” with a fixed interval for each possible values of inten-
sity. The values mentioned in equations. (1), (2), and (3) are very
useful in order to find the local histogram features of the input
image.
Therefore,
number of pixels with intensity n
pðnÞ ¼
total number of pixels
n ¼ 0; 1 . . . . . . N  1 ð1Þ
The equalized histogram image ’g’ is expressed as
!
X
f ði;jÞ
g ði; jÞ ¼ floor ðN  1Þ pðnÞ ð2Þ
n¼0
where floor() it rounds to the nearest integer. That is equivalent
to the reconstruct the intensities of pixel, k.
!
X
k
T ðkÞ ¼ floor ðN  1Þ pðnÞ ð3Þ
n¼0
6. Hierarchical centroid
In hierarchical centroid feature extraction technique [14,15],
the method to calculate the centroid of any image is used. The cen-
troid for finding the centre of mass of a two dimensional plane is
calculated. By doing this, the image is splitted into four different
zones. The initial image is divided into four different images, and
then by using recursive function of hierarchical centroid, the seg-
mented images are also divided into four images in next level. At
level ’i’ (starting at 0), the number of images is 4i+1. The number
of features is the centre coordinates of the image and hence, the
number of features at level ’i’ is 2
4i.
7. Classification techniques
The segmented images, after extraction of features, are required
to undergo in the last step of pattern recognition process called
classification. The classification step requires training and testing
samples. The training samples are used to train the system for
effective classification. The testing samples are helpful for effec-
A. Kumar Sahoo
tiveness of the proposed system. In the proposed work the follow-
ing classifiers are used.
 k-Nearest Neighbor [12]
 Decision Tree [12] and
 Neural Network [12]
7.1. The k-nearest neighbor (k-NN)
The k-NN is a classification technique that used for pattern
recognition for many applications. Actually, feature space tech-
nique is used to classify the items by the classifier. The learning
adopted here is known as lazy learning as the classifier has the
problem of forgetting the previous learning for a new set of data.
The simplest algorithm of machine learning technique is k-NN. It
comes under the supervised learning methodology. The metric
space has the data points. It is not sure that data is only of one type,
it can be multidimensional or even scalar. The data is divided into
training and testing samples. The number of columns must have
been same in sample and in training. There must be same number
of rows in training and group and ’k’ is a single number. This ’k’
influences the generalization of that number which decides the
number of neighbors. If k = 1 then it is simplest nearest neighbor.
’k’ is an even number when more than two groups are needs to
be classified. In case, there is a tie to break, the majority voting rule
will be applied to break the tie. For such systems, the common
approach is the k-NN algorithm. The ’k’ is more alike to users as
nearest neighbor and the user is predicted by its rating basically
according the information which is related to the neighbors that
are selected.
Actually, there are two points on which all the variations is
depended on the algorithm.
In this, we have to calculate the distance which is measured by
implementing the Euclidean Distance as shown in equation . (5).
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u n
uX
Dða; bÞ ¼ t
2
ðbi  ai Þ ð5Þ
i¼1
Where ‘‘a” and ‘‘b” are two points on an n-dimensional space repre-
sented by, a=(a1, a2, a3, . . .an) and b=(b1, b2, b3, . . .bn).
7.2. Decision tree classifier
The decision tree classification technique applies the proper
organized approach for input set of data to generate the classifica-
tion model. To resolve the problem of classification, a straight for-
ward approach is used. The decision tree classifier plotted
questions carefully in such a manner that they are in series and
are about the aspects of the test report. Every time when an answer
is received, the question next to it can be asked as far as the report
of the class label is not reached to its conclusion. The decision tree
classifier arranges the question and conditions in a sequence in the
form of a structure of tree.
This classifier is expressed on the instance space that is recur-
sively partitioned. The tree is made up of different nodes, which
are used to form a rooted tree, that is, also known as the directed
tree. There is only one incoming edge on other nodes. The test node
or the internal node is those nodes which have the outgoing edges.
And rest nodes are leaves or known as the decision nodes. The
instance space of each internal node in decision tree is divided into
two or more than two sub-spaces depending on the values of input
attributes with certain discrete function.
When one takes numeric attributes, range is the condition that
is to be referred. The target value that is more suitable to the rep-
resenting class is assigned to each leaf. One of the inducers of the
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Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx
decision tree is Classification And Regression Tree (CART). The fact
that is represented by the fact is that binary trees are constructed
by it. And there are two outgoing edges at the internal nodes. The
twoing criteria are used for the selection of splits.
7.3. Neural network classifier
A different classifier for solving the problem of classification of
pattern recognition is the neural network classifier. It is one of the
tools to solve the problem with twisted output neurons by using
pattern network of two layer feed-forward. The feed-forward net-
works are the network for recognizing the pattern which is used to
train the data for analyzing the inputs actually according to their
target classes. Basically, the data that is used for recognition of pat-
tern networks should have all the zero values that are considered
by the vectors except in element ’i’ for 1 where ’i’ is basically is a
class which they have to represent.
The classifier has:
 Hidden layers, in this, the user can choose the number of hidden
units.
 Both the resultant and hidden functions are activated in
coordination.
 Algorithm used is backpropogation.
The input data is categorized into three different zones that are
validation data, testing data and training data.
 Training data: For adjusting the weight of network, the training
algorithm is used on this data.
 Validation data: Used to terminate the training process.
 Testing data: This data is used to calculate the efficiency of clas-
sifier. Training process does not use this data.
8. Experimental results
The dataset created are divided into two groups one for digits
and the second for alphabets. The total number of segmented
images on digits is 1000 and is divided into 80 images per digit
for training and 20 images per digit for training. Similarly a total
of 2600 segmented images are divided over training (80%) and
testing (20%).
8.1. Accuracy for digits using different feature extraction techniques
The experimental results show that, number plates are
extracted faithfully based on canny edge detection technique and
connected component algorithm. Character segmentation phase
using connected component analysis works well. For feature
extraction, pixel value, hierarchical centroid and local histogram
methods are used. Earlier Multiclass Support Vector Machine is
used for character recognition and the recognition rate is 79.84%
and the neural network which gives the recognition rate 99.00%,
k-NN gives the recognition rate 99.00% and decision tree classifier
gives the recognition rate of 99.00% on hierarchical centroid fea-
Table 1
Classifiers recognition rates on number plate digit data on various feature extraction
techniques.
Feature extraction Accuracy of classifier (in %)
kNN Decision tree Neural network
Local histogram 99.00 94.50 96.10
Hierarchical centroid 99.00 99.00 99.00
Direct pixel 99.00 95.50 98.00
A. Kumar Sahoo Materials Today: Proceedings xxx (xxxx) xxx

Neural Network

Direct Pixel
Decision Tree
Hierarchical Centroid
Local Histogram

kNN

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Fig. 2. Comparison of accuracy rates of hierarchical centroid, direct pixel and local histogram over various classifier.

ture vector for recognizing the digits. The detailed results are Table 2
shown in Table 1 and Fig. 2 below. From the table it can be con- Classifiers recognition rates on number plate alphabet data on various feature
extraction techniques.
cluded that the hierarchical centroid feature vector produced high-
est recognition accuracy on all classifiers. Feature extraction Accuracy of classifier (in %)
kNN Decision tree Neural network
8.2. Accuracy for alphabets using different feature extraction Local histogram 83.26 69.23 89.26
techniques Hierarchical centroid 92.69 92.69 93.42
Direct pixel 94.42 90.57 95.10

The results obtained from number plate alphabet data are

shown in Fig. 3 and Table 2. In these experiments, maximum accu-
Table 3
racy rate is achieved on direct pixel value feature extraction tech-
Classifiers recognition rates on number plate data (Combined) on various feature
nique over k-NN classifier, hierarchical centtroid feature vector extraction techniques.
over decision tree classifier and again direct pixel value feature
Feature extraction Accuracy of classifier (in %)
extraction technique over neural network classifier. This is due to
26 numbers of classes present in the classification phase of the pro- kNN Decision tree Neural network
posed system. Local histogram 86.94 73.47 91.12
Hierarchical centroid 95.55 89.86 95.31
Direct pixel 95.55 91.38 96.11
8.2.1. Accuracy for combined data using different feature extraction
technique
The digit and alphabet dataset are combined and experiments Fig. 4. The results obtained from all three feature extraction tech-
are conducted on these combined data on various classifiers niques are above 95% except for decision tree classifier. This result
against different feature extraction techniques. The results indicates that a working system can be designed with these feature
obtained from these experiments are shown in Table 3 and extraction techniques and classifiers.

Neural Network

Direct Pixel
Decision Tree
Hierarchical Centroid
Local Histogram

kNN

0 20 40 60 80 100

Fig. 3. Comparison of accuracy rates of number plate alphabet data on hierarchical centroid, direct pixel and local histogram over various classifier.

6
A. Kumar Sahoo
Neural Network
Decision Tree
kNN
0 20 40 60
Fig. 4. Comparison of accuracy rates of number plate combined data on hierarchical centroid, direct pixel and local histogram over various classifiers.
9. Conclusion and future scope
The approach of vehicle number plate recognition need a very
high degree of accuracy when we are performing our task on a very
busy road or parking area which may not be possible manually. As
a human being influenced to get fatigued due to repetitious nature
of the job and they cannot keep record of the vehicles when there
are large numbers of vehicles are passing in a very short time. To
avoid this problem, many attempts have been simulated by the
researchers world wide the globe for last many years. A similar
attempt has been made in this work to develop a specific and auto-
matic number plate recognition system. The accuracy of the pro-
posed system is not 100% in general, but still the approach can
be useful for vehicle identification as the average recognition rate
is about 95% on combined data. It may be achieved that the project
has been by and far fruitful. For future studies online cautioning of
vehicles can be done in case of stolen vehicles.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Ashok Kumar Sahoo: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal
analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project
administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation,
Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
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Further Reading
[1] B. Li, Z.Y. Zeng, J.Z. Zhou, H.L. Dong, An algorithm for license plate recognition
using radial basis function neural network, Int. Sympos. Comp. Sci. Comput.
Technol., pp. 569-572, 2008.