A Study on improving the performance of License Plate Recognition

자동차 번호판 인식 성능 향상에 관한 연구

Nowadays, Cars are continuing to grow at an alarming rate but they also cause many problems such as traffic accident, pollutions and so on. One of the most effective methods that prevent traffic accidents is the use of traffic monitoring systems, which are already widely used in many countries. The monitoring system is beginning to be used in domestic recently. An intelligent monitoring system generates photo images of cars as well as identifies cars by recognizing their plates. That is, the system automatically recognizes characters of vehicle plates. An automatic vehicle plate recognition consists of two main module: a vehicle plate locating module and a vehicle plate number identification module. We study for a vehicle plate number identification module in this paper. We use image preprocessing, feature extraction, multi-layer neural networks for recognizing characters of vehicle plates and we present a feature-comparison method for improving the performance of vehicle plate number identification module. In the experiment on identifying vehicle plate number, 300 images taken from various scenes were used. Of which, 8 images have been failed to identify vehicle plate number and the overall rate of success for our vehicle plate recognition algorithm is 98%.