Automatic license plate recognition using extracted features

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems are employed for detection and recognition of license plate/number plate of vehicles. The performance of existing systems is well below the desired level. In this perspective, there is a definite need to propose a system to overcome the limitations of currently available systems. A new approach is being introduced in this paper for fast and efficient implementation of ALPR system. In this approach, the vertical edge detection algorithm is applied and removes unwanted edges by image normalization technique. The LP region is extracted by incorporating statistical and morphological image processing techniques. For character recognition, the template matching is employed for optical character recognition (OCR). The algorithm is tested on 500 real time images, which are acquired under different illumination conditions and from different scenes. Overall efficiency of the proposed method is 84.8% and the execution time is less than 0.5sec.