Project Synopsis

Title of the Project: Automatic Number Plate Recognition

Introduction
Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) is a mass surveillance method that
uses optical character recognition on images to read license plates on vehicles. They are
used by various police forces and also as a method of electronic toll collection on payper-use roads and monitoring traffic activity: such as red light adherence in an
intersection. ANPR can be used to store the images captured by the cameras as well as
the text from the license plate. ANPR technology tends to be region-specific, owing to
plate variation from place to place.

Problem Statement
This project implements automatic number plate extraction by capturing
the image of the Number plate and performing localization, character
segmentation and recognition using OCR.

Objective
The objective of the project is to successfully locate standard Indian number plate,
segment characters and recognize them given a car image.

Methodologies
The basic process of Number Plate Recognition includes four main stages:
1. Image Acquisition and Pre-processing: Image to be acquired using any
available hardware. These
captured images are in RGB format. Pre-processing is essential to enhance the
input image which in turn reduces time complexity for localization and
segmentation of characters. It mainly involves series of filtering and saturating
the image to make the required region prominent. Finally, it involves
converting the image into gray scale and increasing the contrast.
2. License plate localization: In this stage, the location of the license plate is
identified and the output of this stage will be a sub-image that contains only
the license plate. This is done in two main steps.
Locating a large bounding rectangle over the license plate.
Determining the exact location of the license plate.
3. Character Segmentation: This stage is meant for segmentation of the
characters from the plate. A precise binary image is got after the license plate
localization. In order to recognize the vehicle number plate characters
afterwards, each character must be divided respectively. That is task of

character segmentation. The individual characters have to be distinguished

(segmented) from each other. The output of this stage is a set of monochrome
images for each character in the plate.
4.

Character Recognition: Character recognition step will be identifying the

characteristics of the character input image. In this stage, the segmented
characters are rescaled to match the characters into a standard size. Different
methods can used for character recognition. One of the method for character
recognition is the optical character recognition (OCR) is used to compare the
each individual character against the complete alphanumeric database. The
OCR actually uses correlation method to match individual character and finally
the number/alphabet is identified and stored .The character is then compared
with the database for the vehicle authorization. The resultant signals are given
according to the result of comparison.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Hardware:

Imaging Hardware ( Digital Camera)

System Requirements :
Windows XP/7/8/10
5GB Disk Space
2GB of RAM
Graphics card supporting OpenGL 3.3 with 1GB GPU
memory recommended

Software: MatLab 2011a or above

Applications and Conclusion

ANPR system has its application in number of areas:

Parking automation and security

Vehicular access control
Motorway Road Tolling
Border Control
Law Enforcement

In this Project, automatic number plate recognition using vehicle license plate is
implemented. The system utilizes image processing techniques for identifying the vehicle
number. The system works satisfactorily for wide variation of constraints and different
types of number plates. The system is to be implemented and executed in MatLab and
performance is tested on genuine images.