Application-oriented Farsi license plate recognition using deterministic clustering algorithm and MSER detector

Majlesi Journal of Electrical Engineering

مقاله 6، دوره 10، شماره 2، شهریور 2016   

نوع مقاله: Review Article

نویسندگان

Mohammad Mehdi Zeinali؛ Sedigheh Ghofrani^*

چکیده

The main contribution of this paper is proposing a novel deterministic and non-iterative clustering algorithm for automatic Farsi license plate recognition (ALPR). In fact, after discarding some regions with low probability in terms of being license plate, the edge points inside every separately remained region are considered as a cluster and a Gaussian component is estimated using expectation-maximization (E-M) algorithm, for every cluster. Candidate regions are obtained by applying application-oriented thresholds for size, aspect ratio and orientation to Gaussian components. Then the license plate regions are identified by counting regions like to numeric characters, exploiting maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) detector whereas numeric characters are extracted by using a proposed algorithm, for discarding non-character regions. So, the algorithm is able to segment the license plate numeric and alphabetic characters simultaneously. Finally for character recognition, a new simple, fast and robust algorithm, which uses feature extraction and template matching technique, is proposed. The method is evaluated for detection and recognition, by using an Iranian image database that includes access control (AC), law enforcement (LE) and road patrol (RP) applications. The method is robust to rotation, skew, and multiplicity of license plate and low quality and complex background images.

کلیدواژه‌ها

License plate recognition؛ en؛ law enforcement؛ OCR؛ Deterministic clustering algorithm

مراجع

[1] A.M. Al-Ghaili, S. Mashohor, A. Ramli, and A. Ismail, "Vertical edges-based car license plate detection

method," IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2013, vol.62, pp.26-38.

[2] H.J. Lee, S.Y. Chen, and W.S. Zheng, "Extraction and recognition of license plates of motorcycles and

vehicles on highways," IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004, vol.4, pp.356-359.

[3] B. Hongliang, and L. Changping, "A hybrid license plate extraction method based on edge statistics and

morphology," IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004, vol.2, pp.831-834.

[4] N. Ballas, S.M. Chai, M. Dwyer, and D. Linzmeier, "FPGA implementation of a license plate recognition SoC

using automatically generated streaming accelerators," IEEE International Conference on Parallel and

Distributed Processing Symposium, 2006.

[5] H.P. Wu, H.H. Chen, and R.J. Wu, "License plate extraction in low resolution video," IEEE International

Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2006, vol.1, pp.824-827.

[6] C.T. Hsieh, Y.S. Juan, and K.M. Hung, "Multiple license plate detection for complex background," IEEE

International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, 2005, vol.2, pp.389-392.

[7] V.S.L. Nathan, J. Ramkumar, and S.K. Priya, "New approaches for license plate recognition system," IEEE

International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, 2004, pp.149-152.

[8] V. Seetharaman, A. Sathyakhala, and N.L.S. Vidhya, "License plate recognition system using hybrid neural

networks," IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Information, 2004, vol.1, pp.363-366.

[9] R. Bermananth, A. Chitra, and V. Seetharaman, "A robust video based license plate recognition system," IEEE

International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, 2005, pp.175-180.

[10] Z. Qin, S. Shi, J. Xu and H. Fu, "Method of license plate location based on corner feature," Intelligent Control

and Automation, 2006, vol.2, pp.8645-8649.

[11] K.B. Kim, S.W. Jang and C.K. Kim, "Recognition of car license plate by using dynamic thresholding method

and enhanced neural networks," Computer Analysis of images and patterns, 2003, vol.2756, pp.309-319.

24

[12] M. Rasooli, S. Ghofrani, and E. Fatemizadeh, "Farsi license plate detection based on element analysis and

characters recognition," International Journal of Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition,

2011, vol.4, no.1.

[13] Y.S. Soh, B.T. Chun, and H.S. Yoon, "Design of real time vehicle identification system," IEEE International

Conference on Humans, Information and Technology, 1994, vol.3, pp.2147-2152.

[14] P. Comelli, P. Ferragina, M.N. Granieri and F. Stabile, "Optical recognition of motor vehicle license plates,"

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 1995, vol.4, no.4, pp.790-799.

[15] C.A. Rahman, W. Badawy and A. Radmanesh, "A real time vehicle's license plate recognition system," IEEE

International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, 2003, pp.163-166.

[16] F. Aghdasi and H. Ndungo, "Automatic license plate recognition system," AFRICON Conference, 2004,

Africa, vol.1, pp.45-50.

[17] T. Nukano, M. Fukumi and M. Khalid, "Vehicle license plate character recognition by neural networks," IEEE

Intelligent Signal Processing and Communication Systems, 2004, pp.771-775.

[18] M.K. Kim and Y.B. Kwon, "Recognition of gray character using Gabor filters," International Conference on

Information Fusion, 2002, vol.1, pp.419-424.

[19] S.L. Chang, L.S. Chen, Y.C. Chung and S.W. Chen, "Automatic license plate recognition," IEEE Transactions

on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2004, vol.5, no.1, pp.42-53.

[20] J. Jiao, Q. Ye, and Q. Huang, "A configurable method for multi scale license plate recognition," Pattern

Recognition, 2009, vol.42, no.3, pp.358-369.

[21] K.K. Kim, K.I. Kim, J.B. Kim, and H.J. Kim, "Learning-based approach for license plate recognition, 2000,"

IEEE Signal Processing Society Workshop, vol.2, pp.614-623.

[22] G.S. Hsu, J.C Chen, and Y.Z Chung, "Application-Oriented license plate recognition," IEEE Transactions on

Vehicular Technology, 2013, vol.62, no.2, pp.552-561.

[23] J. Matas, O. Chum, M. Urban, and T. Pajdla, "Robust wide-baseline stereo from maximally stable extremal

regions, 2004," Image and Vision Computing, vol.22, no.10, pp.761-767.

25

[24] M. Zahedi and S. M. Salehi, "License plate recognition system based on SIFT features," World Conference on

Information Technology, 2011, vol.3, pp.998-1002.

[25] M. Ayoubi Mobarhan et al, "A license plate detection algorithm using edge features," Advances in Intelligent

and Soft Computing, 2012, vol.166, pp.413-421.

[26] A.H. Ashtari and M. Fathy, "An Iranian License Plate Recognition System based on Color Features," IEEE

Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2014, vol.15, no.4.

[27] M. Ashoori Lalimi, S. Ghofrani and D. McLernon, "A vehicle license plate detection method using region and

edge based methods," Special Issue on Image and Video Processing, 2013, vol.39, no.3, pp.834-845.

[28] S. Du, M. Ibrahim, M. Shehata, and W. Badawy, "Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR): A state-ofthe-art

review," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2013, vol.23, no.2.