Engraved character recognition using computer vision to recognize engine and chassis numbers: Computer vision technique to identify engraved numbers

Optical character recognition systems (OCR) have been effectively developed for the recognition of printed characters. One such application is the identifying engine number and chassis number which is engraved on machine parts. Manual logging of serial numbers in industries is very tedious and a time consuming affair. Our proposed system is robust under poor illumination conditions. Our overall system is efficient and can be applied in realtime applications. Since OCR is well-studied area where powerful algorithms like Zidouri algorithm for letter segmentation, Blob detection algorithm for removal of unwanted areas and character extraction, Hilditch algorithm for Arabic character recognition already exists, our OCR based engraved character recognition yields more accurate results up to 99.99% accuracy. The paper explains how optical character recognition technique along with computer vision can be applied to identify engine number and chassis number which are engraved on two and four wheeler vehicles.