Number and Letter Character Recognition of Vehicle License Plate Based on Edge Hausdorff Distance

A new algorithm for recognizing number and letter characters of vehicle license plate is presented. The algorithm uses two steps template matching. First, match the characters based on the foreground match measure, background match measure and the whole mismatch measure respectively. Then, do edge detection operations to the mismatched characters. And finally, match the characters using edge Hausdorff distance. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the algorithm. It not only can identify the similar characters, but also offers robustness to the dirty, broken, distorted characters.