CHARACTERS RECONGNIZATION OF AUTOMOBILE LICENSE PLATES ON THE DIGITAL IMAGE Rajasekhar Junjunuri* 1, Sandeep Kotta 1

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1 ISSN IJESR/May 2015/ Vol-5/Issue-5/ Rajasekhar Junjunuri et. al./ International Journal of Engineering & Science Research CHARACTERS RECONGNIZATION OF AUTOMOBILE LICENSE PLATES ON THE DIGITAL IMAGE Rajasekhar Junjunuri* 1, Sandeep Kotta 1 1 Asst. Prof, Dept. of CSE, Dhanekula College of Engg. & Technology, Ganguru, Vijayawada (A.P), India. ABSTRACT Automatic vehicle license plate detection is a key technique in most of traffic related applications and is an active research topic in the image processing domain. Different methods, techniques and algorithms have been developed for license plate detection and recognitions, Approach: Due to the varying characteristics of the license plate like numbering system, colors, language of characters, style (font) and sizes of license plate, further research is still needed in this area. We proposed Development an affective license plate detection and number segmentation system Computer vision algorithms. Get the digital image as a input 1. Plate localization Finding and isolating the plate on the picture 2. Plate orientation and sizing Compensates for the skew of the plate and adjusts the dimensions to the required size 3. Normalization Adjusts the brightness and contrast of the image 4. Character segmentation Finds the individual characters on the plates 5. Optical character recognition (OCR) Translation of images of text into an electronically readable format 6. Syntactical/Geometrical analysis Check characters and positions against state-specific rules to identify the state of issuance for the license plate. Become part of our everyday life. Often they care about safety and control of law and order. Now it sufficiently important task in countries and cities. 1. INTRODUCTION Though the applications of automatic license plate detection have emerged in the last decade or so, the technology has been present for nearly 30 years. In the late 1970s, researchers for the United Kingdom police department manufactured the first working license plate recognition system and began deploying it by the beginning of the 1980s. The first US patent for an automatic license plate reader was issued in In a rare break for computer science, some issuing states/countries around the world adapted their license plates to assist automatic license plate recognition systems. In 2003, the Netherlands modified their license plate by introducing a new typeset font. During the same year, Texas passed a bill banning novelty frames (later overturned in 2007) because they impeded the view of the license plate to recognition systems [4]. Automatic Vehicle number plate recognition system used for identifying number and obtaining owner information from a large database of registration details. Recognition process includes, submitting a query, and extracting characters of the image that best matches with template if matched, obtain the owner details. In which visual contents, normally called as features are used to recognize alphabets and numeral characters to obtain registration details from large databases. Vehicle number plate recognition systems are used as core modules for intelligent infrastructure systems like electronic payment systems (toll payment and parking fee payment) and freeway and arterial management systems for traffic surveillance [5]. Automatic license/number plate recognition is a specific application of optical character recognition. Typically employed by law enforcement agencies, the uses for automatic license plate recognition have grown tremendously since its inception. Automatic license plate recognition may be used to cite individuals who violate traffic signals or drive in excess of the speed limit, as a method of electronic toll collection, to place a suspect at a scene, or identify uninsured motorist (when combined with a database search). License plate recognition may be complicated by frames that obscure parts of the plate, debris, complex backgrounds, and a wide variety of fonts. Furthermore, license plates are not configured in a standard format; license plates typically vary across issuing states and countries. Recognition systems must also account for rotation in the plane if a license plate is improperly mounted (this is more likely to occur after an accident). Difficulties also occur in the acquisition phase. Many systems acquire license plate images in the near-infrared spectrum and providing proper illumination is challenging. Also, cameras must be equipped with *Corresponding Author 302

2 extremely shutter speeds to capture objects moving at very fast speeds. Motion blur and noise make character recognition (and most other areas of computer vision) difficult. Acquisition devices may only have one chance to capture the target, so it is imperative that images are of good quality. The problem of automatic number plate recognition is been done from so many years and many methods have been proposed to address this problem. Developed a mobile LPR system for Android Operating System (OS). LPR involves three main components: license plate detection, character segmentation and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). For License Plate Detection and character segmentation, we used JavaCV and OpenCV libraries. And for OCR, we used tesseractocr [1].Automatic Number Plate Recognition System (ANPR) using Morphological operations, Histogram manipulation and Edge detection Techniques for plate localization and characters segmentation. Artificial Neural Networks are used for character classification and recognition [2]. Neural Network techniques are used for character recognition, one is Back Propagation Neural Network and other one is Learning Vector Quantization Neural Network [3]. Here they have used the technique of binarizing image and edge detection of a license plate image. Line detection is done by using Hough transformation. In next step detected the position of arbitrary shape. Points and regions of different intensity are found using blob analysis, regions are labeled and morphological operations like dilation, erosion are applied on the images. Characters are segmented and based on template matching characters are recognized [4]. Issues such as processing time, computational power, and recognition rate are also addressed in [5]. For character identification preclassification with Euler number, Parallel classification with skeleton features classifier, template matching classifier and neural network classifiers are used [6]. Adaptive thresholding is used because it produced solid characters instead of the contours with edge detection [7]. OCR is used to recognize an optically processed printed character number plate which is based on template matching [8]. Objective is to design an efficient automatic authorized vehicle identification system by using the vehicle number plate. The system is implemented on the entrance for security control of a highly restricted area like military zones or area around top government offices e.g. Parliament, Supreme Court etc [9].Mathematical principles and algorithms, which ensure a process of number plate detection, processes of proper characters segmentation, normalization and recognition. Work comparatively deals with methods achieving invariance of systems towards image skew, translations and various light conditions during the capture [10]. A work on recognizing license plate using segmentation presents a new approach for identifying using localization technique. Algorithm is based on combination of morphological operations based on area. Region properties are used for segmentation of characters. Characters are identified by the technique of template matching [11]. The proposed work is to develop a system to recognize the vehicle number plate and retrieve the owner information from the database. It is based on inputting a vehicle number plate image to the system, which recognizes the characters of vehicle number plate and using that characters the details of particular license plate image are fetched from the database as described in the next section. 2. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 303

3 In this section, the proposed methodology is described as per the block diagram shown in Fig 1 Proposed Algorithm [1] Load image. [2] Pre-processing of the image. [3] Licence plate detection. (3.1) Edges identification using Canny detector. (3.2) Identifying only horizantol & vertical edges using Hough transfromation. (3.3) Extracting vehicle licence plate. [4] Recogination of characters. (4.1) Cutting the upper & lower part of the identified plate. (4.2) Dilation operation to seprate the characters. (4.3) Making blocks of size 38 x 20 for template matching. (4.4) Matching two alphabets by cross-correlation. (4.5) Matching three numbers by cross-correlation. (4.6) Getting the ASCII values through OCR of 2 alphabets & 3 numbers. [5] Number Identifyied. [6] Compare with database stored. [7] Message displayed. 3. PROPOSED STUDY AND IMPLEMENTATION The General Proposed system for the detection of number plates is Introduction to images An image is a matrix with X rows and Y columns. It is represented as function say f(x, y) of intensity values for each color over a 2D plane. 2D points, pixel coordinates in an image, can be denoted using a pair of values. Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 304

4 In digital image, pixels contain color value and each pixel uses 8 bits (0 to 7 bits). Most commonly, image has three types of representation gray scale image, Binary image and colored image as shown in figure 8 (b), (c), (d) respectively. Gray scale image, figure (b), calculates the intensity of light and it contains 8 bits (or one Byte or 256 values i.e. 28 = 256). Each pixel in the gray scale image represents one of the 256 values, in particular the value 0 represents black, 255 represents the white and the remaining values represents intermediate shades between black and white. The images with only two colors (black and white) are different to these gray scale images. Those two colored images are called binary images (c). So binary representation of the images does not contains shades between black and white. Color images, (d) are often built of several stacked color channels, each of them representing value levels of the given channel. For example, RGB images are composed of three independent channels for red, green and blue as primary color components. The color image contains 24 bits or 3 bytes and each byte has 256 values from 0 to Process of acquisition Image acquisition is the process of obtaining an image from the camera. This is the first step of any vision based systems. In our current research we acquire the images using a digital camera placed by the road side facing towards the incoming vehicles.here our aim is to get the frontal image of vehicles which contains license plate. The remaining stages of the system works in offline mode. Grayscale image: After acquiring the image, the very next step is to derive the gray scale image. Pseudo code to convert an image to a grayscale: STEP1 : Load the image STEP2 : Retrieve the properties of image like width, height and nchannels STEP3: Get the pointer to access image data STEP4: For each height and for each width of the image, convert image to grayscale by calculating average of r,g,b channels of the imageconvert to grayscale manually STEP5 : Display the image after converting to grayscale The flowchart shown in the following figure describes the algorithm to convert an image to gray scale image. Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 305

5 Where brightness changes sharply. This change is measured by derivative in1d.for biggest change derivative has max value (or) second derivative is zero. The detection of edge is most important as the success of higher level processing relies heavily on good edges Image Processing Pre- Processing: The pre-processing is the first step in number plate recognition. It consists the following major stages: 1.Binarization, 2.Noise Removal Binarization: The input image is initially processed to improve its quality and prepare it to next stages of the system. First, the system will convert RGB images to gray-level images. Noise Removal: In this noise removal stage we are going to remove the noise of the image i.e., while preserving the sharpness of the image. After the successful Localization of the Number Plate, we go on with Optical Character Recognition which involves the Segmentation, Feature extraction and Number plate Recognition. 3.3 Character Segmentation Segmentation is one of the most important processes in the automatic number plate recognition, because all further steps rely on it. If the segmentation fails, a character can be improperly divided into two pieces, or two characters can be improperly merged together. We can use a horizontal projection of a number plate for the segmentation, or one of the more sophisticated methods, such as segmentation using the neural networks. In this segmentation we use two types of segmentation: 1. Horizontal segmentation 2. Vertical segmentation. First we have performed vertical segmentation on the number plate then the characters are vertically segmented. After performing vertical segmentation we have to perform horizontal segmentation by doing this we get character from the plate. 3.4 Character Recognition We have to recognize the characters we should perform feature extraction which is the basic concept to recognize the character. The feature extraction is a process of transformation of data from a bitmap representation into a form of descriptors, which are more suitable for computers. The recognition of character should be invariant towards the user font type, or deformations caused by a skew. In addition, all instances of the same character should have a similar description. A description of the character is a vector of numeral values, so called descriptors or patterns. 4. PROPOSED ALGORITHM AND IMPLEMENTATION 4.1 Character segmentation This is the second major part of the License Plate detection algorithm. There are many factors that cause the character segmentation task difficult, such as image noise, plate frame, rivet, space mark, and plate rotation and illumination variance. We here propose the algorithm that is quite robust and gives significantly good results on images having the above mentioned problems. The Steps involved in character Segmentation are: Preprocessing: Preprocessing is very important for the good performance of character segmentation. Our preprocessing consists of conversion to grayscale and binarization using a object enhancement technique. The steps involved are: Conversion to Grayscale, Binarization. Compared with the usual methods of image Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 306

6 binarization, this algorithm uses the information of intensity and avoids the abruption and conglutination of characters that are the drawbacks of usual image binarization techniques. Object enhancement algorithm: The quality of plate images varies much in different capture conditions. Illumination variance and noise make it difficult for character segmentation. Then some image enhancement should be adopted to improve the quality of images. As we all know, the image enhancement methods of histogram equalization and gray level scaling have some side effects. They may have the noise enhanced as well. For character segmentation, only the character pixels need to be enhanced and the background pixels should be weakened at the same time. In fact, a license plate image contains about 20% character pixels. So these 20% character pixels need to be enhanced and the rest pixels need to be weakened. It is called object enhancement. The object enhancement algorithm consists of two steps: Firstly, gray level of all pixels is scaled into the range of 0 to 100 and compared with the original range 0 to 255, the character pixels and the background pixels are both weakened. Secondly, sorting all pixels by gray level in descending order and multiply the gray level of the top 20% pixels by Then most characters pixels are enhanced while background pixels keep weakened. The following figure shows the result of object enhancement. It can be seen from the figure that after object enhancement the contrast of peaks and valleys of the projection is more significant than the original. 4.2 Horizontal Segmentation For this we calculate the horizontal and vertical projections of intensity. Then we find the local minima for horizontal projection. Based on the threshold calculated from the above local minima s, we find x locations of the segmented regions. In order to locate the right and left edges of license plate from candidate region, the vertical projection after mathematical morphology deal is changed into binary image. The arithmetic for doing this is: F = Image between i & l Where, ft (1, i) is the vertical projection after mathematical morphology, T is the threshold. Then scan the function of ft (1, i) and register the potions where values change from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 0 in stack1 and stack2 respectively. So the candidate position of the left and right edge of the license plate are in stack1 (1,i) and stack2(1,i) respectively, and the candidate s width of the license plate is calculated by: Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 307

7 These give the coordinates of the potentially candidates regions. Merging and removing the Horizontal segments: Based on thresholds found by experiments we merge two segments if they happen to be very close and the segments having width less than a specified threshold are dropped. 4.3 Finding Vertical bounds For each of the horizontal segments we follow the same procedure as discussed above to get the vertical bounds. Result - The following is the image obtained on performing character segmentation on the extracted license plate from im1.jpg 5. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION OCR is the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text. The procedure consists of two important steps, training and recognition. Training: The program is first trained with a set of sample images for each of the characters to extract the important features based on which the recognition operation would be performed. Our program is trained on a set of 10 characters with 10 samples of each. Extract License Plate: From the above steps, we can get the row and column position of the license plate. Implemented algorithm at times gives more than 1 license plate on detection. 6. CONCLUSION This paper presents a recognition method in which the vehicle plate image is obtained by the digital cameras and the image is processed to get the number plate information. A rear image of a vehicle is captured and processed using various algorithms. Further we are planning to study about the characteristics involved with the automatic number plate system for better performance. Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 308

8 REFERENCES [1] Yang F, Ma Z. Vehicle License Plate location Based on Histogramming and Mathematical Morphology, [2] Duan TD, Duc DA, Hong Du TL. Combining Hough Transform and Contour Algorithm for detecting Vehicles. License-Plates, October [3] Duan TD, Hong Du TL, Phuoc TV, Hoang NV. Building an Automatic Vehicle License-Plate Recognition System, Febraury [4] CheokMan, Kengchung. A High Accurate Macau License Plate Recognition System, [5] Thuy R, Nguyen T, Pham XD JeonJW. Rectangular Object Tracking Based on Standard Hough Transform, February [6] Zhang Y, Zhang C. A New Algorithm for Character Segmentation of License Plate, June [7] Jia W, Zhang H, He X. Mean Shift for Accurate Number Plate Detection, July Copyright 2015 Published by IJESR. All rights reserved 309