International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract

One of the most important topics of intelligent transportation system (ITS) is the License Plate Recognition (LPR). LPR systems have many potential applications in intelligent traffic systems, such as the payment of parking fee, highway toll fee, traffic data collection, traffic monitoring systems, traffic law enforcement, security control of restricted areas and so on. Generally, LPR was developed to identify vehicles by the contents of their license plates. The LPR system consists of four major modules: image acquisition, license plate extraction, segmentation and recognition of individual characters. This paper presents a study of applying the template matching approach for character image recognition. The new approach can be applied equally to Egyptian and Saudi Arabian cases and can be extended to cover more countries. It is based on keeping the names of these countries along with a list of Arabic characters as entries in a table and then matching these entries one by one with the car plate. The new approach is tested on 400 samples of extracted license plate images captured in outdoor environment. The result yield 90% recognition accuracy, the method takes 1.6 seconds to perform the car plate recognition.