License Plate Recognition (LPR) system for Indian Vehicle License Plate Extraction and Character Segmentation

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is a challenging area of research due to its importance to variety of commercial applications. LPR systems are widely implemented for automatic ticketing of vehicles at car parking area, tracking vehicles during traffic signal violations and related applications with huge saving of human energy and cost. The overall problem may be subdivided into three distinct key modules: (a) localization of license plate from vehicle image, (b) segmentation of the characters within the license plate and (c) recognition of segmented characters within the license plate. In this paper, we proposed a method of feature extraction[12] for an offline License Plate Recognition System based on global features to identify the license plates. Before extracting the features, preprocessing[11] of the captured image is necessary in order to isolate the license plate region from the car backround and to remove the noise present, using filter[2]. Sobel edge detection e technique [1][7] is used to determine the edges of the license plate whereas the features are extracted using Radon transform[10]. Features are saved and tested against already saved database and the availability of the vehicle is displayed as an output .In this work, 100 real time vehicle images are captured from a high resolution camera during different contrast of day. The images are stored in a centralized data server.A sample of 20 images are tested against the already saved database in order to check the authenticity of each vehicle. The performance of the system is measured at the time of recognition which is 95 % and at the time of matching i.e checking the existence of a particular vehicle is 90% in a time duration of 15 sec.