Real Time License Plate Recognition via Watershed and Viterbi Algorithm

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is the extraction of vehicle license plate information from still images or frame sequences (videos). Character segmentation & recognition has long been a critical area of the OCR process. The characters are detected in the order defined by the matching quality. In this paper three main procedures watershed, thresholding and hidden markov model based Viterbi algorithm was used to perform license plate segmentation and recognition tasks. The watershed transformation with thresholding algorithm based on the gradient approach gives good results for segmentation of characters. This is mainly designed for Indian Car license plate. The procedure follows a simple and effective way to segment and recognize the characters. This paper also presents extensive experiments using real video sequences to verify the proposed method.

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