Abstract

Two different methods to extract the license plate area of a vehicle have been used for automatic recognition purposes. One method is with a color vision system and the other is with an edge detecting operator. The system with color vision has some problems if the colors of license plate and vehicle's body are similar. The various plate colors in Korea also drops the system performance. The edge detecting operator also has a problem for a real time processing since it performs on all pixels of the scene. In this paper a possible method using gray level vision system and available pre-known information of license plates is suggested. The suggested procedure searches the lower boundary of the plate by counting high contrast points between one and near pixel from the bottom line of the scene. It finds the upper boundary from the bottom line by adding number plate height after finding the lower boundary. The left and right boundaries are found by similar processes.

Keywords