Automatic Digit and Alphabet Recognition Based Online Toll Collection System

Radio frequency identification (RFID) based automatic highway toll collection system has become very popular among developed countries. However, RFID is not feasible for developing countries to embed with each vehicle since it is very costly. Moreover, as metal objects can influence Radio Frequency (RF) field, intently the nearness of any metal object while reading RFID information may result in unwanted noise. These problems are still significant concerns. We propose a vehicle number plate recognition-based automated toll collection system to address these issues, which is more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective for widely use. In this research, the Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) based template matching algorithm is exploited for character recognition from each vehicle's number plate. After recognizing characters from a number plate successfully, a fixed amount of toll fee is charged automatically according to the vehicle's category.