Automatic car plate detection and recognition through intelligent vision engineering

License plate recognition systems are becoming the key to many traffic related applications such as road traffic monitoring or parking lot access control. In this paper, a software and hardware architecture implemented in the ESPRIT 5184 LOCOMOTIVE project for automatic vehicle plate number identification is presented. The system, developed in order to dynamically recognize symbol clusters on moving objects, integrates different computer vision techniques related to intrusion detection and automatic pattern recognition in slightly controlled environments, keeping real time operation.