An approach to Korean license plate recognition based on vertical edge matching

License plate recognition (LPR) has many applications in traffic monitoring systems. In this paper, a vertical edge matching based algorithm to recognize a Korean license plate from an input gray-scale image is proposed. The algorithm is able to recognize license plates in normal shape, as well as plates that are out of shape due to the angle of view. The proposed algorithm is fast enough and the recognition unit of the LPR system can be implemented only in software so that the cost of the system is reduced.