Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC (전자공학회논문지SC)

The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (대한전자공학회)
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A Robust License Plate Extraction Method for Low Quality Images

저화질 영상에서 강건한 번호판 추출 방법

  • Lee, Yong-Woo (Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University) ;
  • Kim, Hyun-Soo (Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University) ;
  • Kang, Woo-Yun (Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University) ;
  • Kim, Gyeong-Hwan (Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University)
  • Published : 2008.03.25
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Abstract

This paper proposes a robust license plate extraction method from images taken under unconstrained environments. Utilization of the color and the edge information in complementary fashion makes the proposed method deal with not only various lighting conditions, hilt blocking artifacts frequently observed in compressed images. Computational complexity is significantly reduced by applying Hough transform to estimate the skew angle, and subsequent do-skewing procedure only to the candidate regions. The true plate region is determined from the candidates under examination using clues including the aspect ratio, the number of zero crossings from vertical scan lines, and the number of connected components. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using compressed images collected under various realistic circumstances. The experimental results show 94.9% of correct license plate extraction rate.

본 논문에서는 매우 다양한 조건하에서 취득된 영상으로부터 차량 번호판 영역을 추출하는 방법을 제안한다. 제안하는 방법은 색상정보와 에지정보를 보완적으로 사용함으로써 다양한 조명조건은 물론 압축영상에서 흔히 나타나는 영상의 블록화 현상에 강건하게 번호판을 추출한다. 번호판 기울기 각도 보정은 탐색된 영역만을 허프 변환을 통해 각도를 추정, 보정함으로써 연산량을 줄였다. 최종 번호판 후보지 결정은 대상 영역의 가로 대 세로 비율 평가, 수평 스캔하여 영점 교차되는 양상 평가, 레이블링 방법을 이용한 연결 성분 수 측정 등의 방법을 이용하여 결정한다. 다양한 시간대에 수집된 차량 영상을 대상으로 수행된 실험을 통해 제안하는 방법이 강건하게 번호판을 추출 할 수 있음을 확인하였다. 실제 주정차 단속 영상을 대상으로 실험한 결과 94.9%의 번호판 추출 결과를 얻었다.

Keywords

References

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