Blob extraction based character segmentation method for automatic license plate recognition system

A character segmentation algorithm for automatic license plate recognition is presented in this paper. Character regions are selected through binarization, connected component analysis, and character recognition. A blob analysis operation excludes noisy blobs, merges fragmented blobs, and splits clumped blobs. A character segmentation module achieved an accuracy rate of 97.2%. The recognition accuracy of the complete system with license plate localization was 90.9%. In depth analysis of failure cases is also provided for better understanding of the algorithm and a future development direction.