License Plate Recognition System-Survey

P. R. Sanap and S. P. Narote

Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune, India
Abstract: License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems commonly have framework of processing steps such as: Detection of number plate,
Segmentation of plate characters and Recognition of each character. Number plate detection is a challenging task due to diversity of plate
formats and environmental conditions during the image acquisition. Accuracy of character segmentation and recognition rely on the
efficiency of plate detection. Various algorithms are developed for this work. Purpose of this paper is to categorize and brief them. Key
words: Number plate detection, Character segmentation, Character recognition.
I. INTRODUCTION
License Plate Recognition is an advanced machine
vision technology used to identify vehicles by their number
plates without direct human intervention. This development
of Intelligent Transportation System provides the data of
vehicle numbers which can be used in follow up, analyses
and monitoring. Besides traffic monitoring this technology is
gaining popularity in various applications day by day, such
as, highway toll collection, border and custom checkpoints,
parking access control system. Recently, with the increase of
terrorism acts, it is strongly expected that LPR will gain great
importance in security all over the world. LPR algorithm
consists of the following three processing steps: 1) Number
plate detection, 2) Character segmentation, and 3) Character
recognition. The accuracy of plate extraction relies on the
character segmentation and character recognition.
Detection of number plate is difficult task, due to
the following reasons: 1) Generally number plate occupies a
small portion of the whole image 2) Large varieties in
number plate formats, styles and colors which differs from
one country to another, 3) There are several other factors
which could influence the efficiency of the extraction, are,
blurry image, uneven or low illumination, vehicle motion,
low resolution of the input image, distorted characters, dirty
plates, shadow and reflection etc. Similarly, there are many
difficulties faced in character segmentation, such as,
influence of image noise, plate frame, rivet, space mark, and
plate rotation and illumination variance. It is also difficult for
accurate and real time character segmentation under the
situation where number plate boundaries are close to the
characters, or the characters are spaced closed to each other
or the characters are broken.
Accuracy of character recognition will be
significantly reduced if the characters are not properly
segmented. Improper segmentation of characters will result
in mis-recognized characters.
Various algorithms have been developed for
number plate detection. Generally, number plate detection
algorithm consists of three state frameworks: 1) Pre-
processing of the input image, 2) Number plate detection and
3) Extraction of number plate and plate validation. Literature
survey is based upon the number plate extraction algorithm
that follows three state frameworks. Methods have been
evaluated at different conditions such as size of input image,
distance between camera and vehicle, different illumination
conditions, type of name plate.
Methods evaluated for character segmentation work
under different conditions such as size of input image,
different illuminating conditions, orientation of name plate.
There is no uniformity in the techniques used for character
segmentation.
Hence it is inappropriate to explicitly conclude which
method actually demonstrates the highest performance. So
the scope of this paper is to highlight only, the methods used
for number plate detection, character segmentation and
recognition.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explains
various algorithms employed for number plate detection.
Character segmentation methods are discussed in Section 3,
whereas Section 4 introduces the character classification and
recognition techniques. Section 5 concludes the paper
followed by references.
II. METHODS FOR NUMBER PLATE DETECTION
Character segmentation and recognition relies on the
accuracy of number plate extraction. Hence this processing
step is critical one and emphasizes on developing numerous
techniques so that number plate detection is faithful.
Methods to detect the number plate are based on: texture,
edge detection, histogram, morphological processing, and
transformation. In this paper we have covered the brief
addressing of these methods.
A. Texture based Candidate Extraction
Texture and edge information are considered for
number plate extraction in [1]. The method uses projection
properties to detect the candidate number plate. Since the
maximum projection does not correspond to the plate area
all the time, several peak lines in vertical projection are
detected and maximum peak values are considered as
reference lines. After binarization, all connected component
areas across each reference line, are sorted by acreage,
which is used to calculate the size of sliding window. All
candidates are extracted along with Rank filter and Robert’s
operator. The result of searching reference line is as shown
in Figure. 1. To reject the detected fake candidates, auto-
correlation followed by projection algorithm has been
implemented. The method is used to detect different types of
Chinese name plates and different illumination conditions in
real scene. The performance was reported for 1704 images
with the recognition accuracy of 97.5%.
(a)

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 (b) (c) (b)

Figure 1. Searching reference lines: (a) input gray scale

image; (b) result of Rank filter; (c) vertical projection and
reference lines corresponding to the peaks featured in [1].

B. Edge Detection based Plate Extraction

A new algorithm for plate extraction is proposed in [2]
which is double chance algorithm, Line grouping (LG) and (c)
Edge Density (ED) as an approach to car number plate
extraction. The first algorithm extracts the line segments and Figure 2. (a) Result of Line approximation; (b) Rectangles
groups them based on a set of geometrical conditions. It groups; (c) Detected Plate Region , featured in [2].
detects a rectangle at the plate boundary accurately. If no
rectangle group was made in LG, the image is rejected. The
rejected image is given a second chance in which the ED
method is used. The second algorithm finds plate regions at
which the vertical edges appear densest. The double chance
framework is evaluated with and without the verification
process. The verification process is performed using the
character segmentation module. Using a real-life database
collected by the speed enforcement camera, a high success (a)
rate of 99.45% is obtained, through use of the double chance
approach with verification. The results of LG and ED
algorithms are depicted in Figure.2 and Figure.3
respectively.
In the method that uses local variance; vertical edges in
the input image are detected first by using Sobel vertical
gradient [3]. As the number plate is the area with large local
variance, it is measured and the maximum local variance
(b)
declares the possible candidate number plate. To verify the
real number plate, possibility measurement, based upon the Figure 3. ED algorithm as appeared in [2]: (a) Vertical edge
geometric features of plate, such as area, orientation and map; (b) Detected Plate region.
density is evaluated.
An approach to Korean number plate recognition based
An algorithm implemented in [4], commits the on vertical edge matching in developed by Mei Yu and
detection of number plate for overexposure and complex Youg Sealc Kim in [5]. Algorithm has edge detection, size
vehicle image. Instead of using traditional histogram and shape filtering, edge matching and plate extracting, as
equalization, novel equalization technique is to fill up all the important processing steps to extract candidate number
empty bins using linear interpolation technique is proposed. plate. Edge detection is based on the fact that, if the two
Sobel edge detection is used in this algorithm to find the vertical edges of the license plate can be detected exactly,
region which has a high pixel variance value. Then black four corners of the plate can be located and candidate plate
pixel regions are checked to find out candidate region. The can exactly be extracted from input image even if it is out of
plate verification processing step executes histogram shape. Vertical edges are found out by computing vertical
analysis to eliminate fake candidate areas. Plate extraction edge intensity function of the input image which is then by
performance rate found to be 94%. binarized with respect to threshold which is decided based
on mean and standard deviation of vertical edge intensity
function. After the vertical edge image is obtained, it is
filtered to remove edges that are impossible to be the edges
of the plate. This is done by using seed filling based filter
which uses a region of white pixels that are 8-connected to
each other. The edge area, slope and height are checked with
respect to predefined parameters. Unsatisfactory edges are
(a) removed and converted to black while the co-ordinates of

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top and bottom pixels of the selected edge area are recorded
for further edge matching process. In the edge matching
step, the ratio of width to height is used to judge whether
two edge areas are the pair of vertical edges of number
plate. The real ratio may deviate due to the angle of view.
Hence the difference in the ratios of real plate and candidate
plate is restricted to be within specified range. Also, two
edge areas are matched for equal height. For true number
plate, the percentage of white pixels is checked for specified
lower and higher range. This extracted plate is then
normalized and sharpened. Correct plate extraction rate
obtained is 98.45%.
Nabeel Khan et al in [6] have developed a new
algorithm for plate extraction. After the detection of gray
scale image, the brightness of image is enhanced by taking
the power of each pixel value as given by (1),
I(i,j)=I(i,j)p (1)
Where I (i, j) represents gray image, resulting in the image
with brighter edges. For plate segmentation SCAN_MP
algorithm is implemented which finds out only those objects
which have horizontal and vertical lines. It checks for
multiple rows and columns to ensure the correct extraction
of the object. Extracted plates are validated by using specific
features of it like width by height ratio and ratio of black
pixels.
C. Morphological based Plate Extraction
In [7], edges in the input images are detected first. Then
vertical projections of the edge image are found out. Due to
vertical edges in structures such as fences or background,
they can be selected as candidate regions. To prevent this,
authors have proposed the compact factor. A number plate
has vertical edges in a narrow range but those structures
have vertical edges in a wide range. This feature is used in
compact factor. By using it, brightness of pixels in rows is
found out and local maximum in that gives the possible
candidate area. Plates are extracted by using morphological
operations.
D. Plate Extraction by Smearing Algorithm
Serkan Ozbay, and Ergun Ercelebi used Smearing
algorithm in [8] to find the plate region. As Smearing is a
method of extraction of text areas on a mixed image, this
technique is used to find out the plate area. In this, the image
is processed along vertical and horizontal scan lines
depending upon the prescribed minimum and maximum
thresholds, for both vertical and horizontal Smearing, white
pixels are converted to black. Then morphological operation
is applied to the image for specifying the plate location.
Authors gained success of plate extraction f or 97.6%.
E. Plate Extraction by Image Transformation
In the method developed in [9], Hough transform and
contour algorithm are combined from the extracted edging
image contour algorithm is used to detect closed boundaries
of the objects. These contour lines are transformed to
Hough, to find out two intersected parallel lines which
establishes parallelogram and which this is considered as
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candidate plate. Candidates are verified by two stages,
evaluating width/height ratio and evaluation based on
horizontal crosscuts. In the first stage, only selected
candidates are verified against satisfactory predefined
constraints on width/height ratio. In the second stage, two
horizontal crosscuts at 1/3 and 2/3 of candidate’s height are
used. The number of objects that cut these crosscuts is
counted. Two approximate constraints are predefined for
this evaluation. Correct accuracy of extraction is 98.76 % by
this algorithm.
III. Methods for Character Segmentation
I. Number plate candidates considered in extraction
stage are examined in the phase of character segmentation.
A wide variety of techniques to segment each character after
plate localization has been developed. Segmentation
techniques based on projection, Hough transform, region
growing, and plate models are considered for addressing.
A. Segmentation by Projection
In [10], horizontal histogram is used to find out upper
and lower bounds of a number plate on the vertical edging
image first. After the area bounded by upper and lower
bounds is found, the areas above the upper bound and the
areas below the lower bound of a number plate are removed.
Area without the upper and lower bounds is considered for
character segmentation. Character segmentation phase is
executed in two steps. First the selected area is binarized
and secondly vertical projection is performed to find the
gaps between characters for a number plate. Based on the
results of vertical projection, each number plate is separated
into blocks horizontally starting from the zero points in the
projection histogram. Figure.4 shows the block segmented
image of number plate. Because of the influence of noise,
rivet, space mark, rotation of plate, it may happen that one
character region has been separated or two characters are
grouped into one single character. Hence a refining
algorithm is developed by the authors. This refining is based
on width of original number plate characters. The result of
refining is demonstrated in Figure.5. This method has
correct character segmentation rate of 98.82%.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure.4. Results featured in [10]: (a) input images detected;
(b) binarized images with upper and lower bounds removed;
(c) segmentation of number plate.

Figure 5. Refining of character ‘A’ connected to the left
boundary of the number plate.
The method developed in [11] has been implemented
after the processing of captured image and number plate
extraction. The idea is based on the fact that, number plate
area is usually vertically and horizontally centered. So by
taking vertical concentration top and bottom positions of the
characters is found out. By knowing these positions exact
plate area is segmented out. Character segmentation is
carried out by taking horizontal concentration of the image.
B. Segmentation based on Hough Transform
Yungang Zang and Changshui Zhang developed a new
algorithm in [12] based on Hough Transform. As a
preprocessing step, extracted plate image is enhanced so that
most character pixel is brightened while, background pixels
are weakened. Character segmentation algorithm is executed
in two stages: horizontal segmentation and vertical
segmentation. Horizontal segmentation is processed in three
steps: 1) image is divided into many blocks based on
vertical projection of the extracted plate image, 2) horizontal
segmentation line is found put for each block by analyzing
horizontal projection of the blocks, which is called as
subsection line, 3) using Hough transform on the midpoints
of all subsection lines, all incorrect subsection lines are
eliminated according to prescribed criteria, and then all
correct subsection lines are combined into a whole line.
Advantages committed by this algorithm are; no need of
rotation correction of plate images, influence of background
is weakened and also the illumination variance. Vertical
segmentation algorithm is based on the projection analysis
constrained by the prior knowledge of the number plate such
as, size of number plate and character, interval between the
characters and inters segment distance. Vertical
segmentation lines are decided on the basis of valleys in the
vertical projection, prior knowledge of the plate, and finding
out the variance of pixel’s gray level in the image. Results
obtained for horizontal and vertical segmentation are
demonstrated in Figure.6.
(a)
(b)
Figure 6. Horizontal and Vertical segmentation proposed in
[12]:
(a) Horizontal segmentation (b) Vertical segmentation.
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C. Region Growing based Segmentation
Six step algorithms is proposed in [13]: image
preprocessing, enhancement of character regions, edge
detection of characters, location of the candidate regions of
the characters, determination of character segmentation
regions, characters segmentation and binarization. This
algorithm is processed on extracted car number plates.
Character regions are enhanced by contrast stretching
transformation followed by edge detection using Laplacian
Transformation. Location of the candidate regions are found
out with the help of region growing algorithm. Region
Growing is a procedure that groups pixels or sub regions
into larger regions based on predefined criteria. The basic
approach is to start with a set of ‘seed points’ and from these
seed points growing the regions by appending to each seed,
to those neighboring pixels that have properties similar to
seed point. In this paper, starting pixels are selected having
the grey value of 255 and region is grown from seeds to
with the pixels that are 8-connected to at least one pixel in
that region. To eliminate the fake regions, standard value of
height and width of characters are used for comparisons.
Refining process is also proposed for region growing
algorithm, which then extracts correct segmented characters.
After getting the exact position of characters, characters are
extracted from original image and binarized to get higher
contrast. Figure.4 illustrates the execution of this region
growing algorithm. In this method 320 images were tested
for character segmentation and the success rate obtained is
97.2%.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 7. Region growing algorithm featured in [13]: (a)
Number plate after region growing, (b) Exact characters
segmented, (c) Binarized character image.
D. Segmentation based on prior knowledge of number
plate models
In [3], and [14] characters were segmented based on
prior knowledge of the number plate model and connected
component analysis. To follow the connected component
analysis, it is necessary to know the standard number plate
features such as horizontal orientation of characters, size
and font of characters, size of name plate, distance between
the characters, distance of left and rightmost characters from
vertical edge of plate and distance of characters from
horizontal edge of the plate.
IV. Methods for Character Recognition
Character recognition fully relies on isolated characters.
Inefficiency of character segmentation influences the
success of character to be recognized. For this work, various
techniques have been proposed which are based on
statistical classifiers, computational intelligence architecture
and pattern matching.
A. Statistical Classifiers
To eliminate the inefficiency of OCR and pattern
matching techniques statistical classifiers employ Support
Vector Machine for recognition. Authors in [15] employ
SVM to recognize numbers. The algorithm starts from a
collection of samples of numbers from number plates. Each
character is recognized by an SVM, which is trained by
some known samples in advance. In order to recognize a
number plate correctly, all numbers are tested one by one
using the trained model. The recognition results are
achieved by finding the maximum value between the
outputs of SVMs. Similar SVM based algorithm for
recognition is proposed in [16], and [17].
B. ANN Classifiers
IN [18], authors have formulated joint segmentation and
recognition in a unified framework instead cascaded
operation or feedback mechanism. A two layer Markov
network is proposed to integrate these two tasks into one
statistical framework. Both low level cues and high level
prior knowledge are incorporated in terms of probabilities.
An efficient non-iterative belif propagation algorithm is
used for state estimation. In [6], recognition algorithm uses
both techniques of template matching and NN (Perceptron).
Compared with these two techniques, NN have provided
better matching for recognition s compared to template
matching (91% against 86%).
C. Pattern /Template Matching
The pattern matching technique is suitable for the
recognition of shape invariant, non-rotated characters. P.
Comelli et al. used in [19], cross co-relation to find out the
matching between normalized characters and templates.
This algorithm is implemented on Italian cars passing
through tollgate. Templates are designed for two-letter
province, single prototypes for character string. Algorithm
tested more than three thousand real images acquired under
different weather and illumination condition obtaining a
recognition rate near to 91%. Authors in [20] developed an
OCR technique, for recognition of Thai car license plates,
which are generally shape complicated, using essential-
elements-based method. This algorithm recognizes the
character patterns relying on the essential elements of
characters. Using this method, majority of characters are
reduced to a set of essential strokes. In [21], matching of
characters is based on edge Hausdorff Distance (HD), also
called max-min distance. It is a measure of similarity
between two arbitrary point sets. The method possesses all
the mathematical properties of a metric, and its recognition
rate is very similar that obtained with neural network
classifiers but slightly slower.
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V. Conclusions
This paper has attempted to provide a survey of
research on LPR algorithms and to offer addressing of some
categories of the methods used in references. This paper
discusses the techniques of number plate detection,
character segmentation and character recognition. Though
there are several commercial LPR systems, briefing the
techniques used in these systems is beyond the scope of this
paper, as their operation is strictly confidential.
LPR algorithms addressed were country specific. To
predict the number plate, algorithms presented in the
literature are restricted to the working conditions such as,
distance, background, illumination, vehicle position.
LPR can be a measure of vehicle identification, it may
be further exploited for vehicle model identification and
speed estimation. The measure of section travel time could
be useful in traffic management, planning and control.
Increased mobility and globalization set the challenges
of developing effective LPR system that could handle plate
from various countries with different character sets and
syntax. Most LPR system focuses on processing of one
nameplate in the image. But, as, input image may contain
more than one name plates; the future challenging task is to
detect these plates.
VI. Acknowledgment
I express my gratitude towards my project guide, Prof.
S. P. Narote for, giving the valuable guidance, also, keen
and active interest in my efforts, which contributed for the
solution of every problem at each stage of my project. I
would like to thank Prof. S. A. Kulkarni for his valuable
support and advice on all the stages of the project.
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