A fast algorithm for license plate detection

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is one of the most important types of intelligent transport system and is of considerable interest because of its potential applications to many areas such as highway electronic toll collection, traffic monitoring systems and so on. It was developed to identify vehicles by the contents of their license plate. Research is in progress for the recognition of Korean, Chinese, European and other license plates. In this paper, we will describe a fast algorithm for automatic license plate detection system for the Egyptian license plates that achieves a high detection rate without the need for a high quality images from expensive hardware. The system captures images of the vehicles with a digital camera. An algorithm for the extraction of the license plate has been explained and designed using Matlab. We achieved about 96% detection rate for small dataset.