Character-based car plate detection and localization

In this paper we address the issue of locating non-standard Malaysian car license plate. Instead of searching the region for the plate, we directly locate the alphanumeric characters of the car plate. In this manner, we remove issues such as plate size variations and plates on black colored vehicles. Our main goal is to locate and extract the alphanumeric characters of Malaysian special plates. These special plates do not follow the normal standard car plates' format as they may contain italic, cursive and connected letters, and of different fonts. Using several parameters such as pixel compactness, angles, and projection histogram, we use ruled-based technique to locate and detect these special characters of the car plates. The results have shown that we are able to automatically locate with an accuracy of 95%.