Vehicle license plate character recognition by neural networks

This paper tries to recognize characters of vehicle license plates in Malaysia. Vehicle license plate recognition is one of important techniques that can be used for the identification of vehicles. It is useful in many applications such as entrance admission, security, parking control, airport or harbor cargo control, road traffic control, speed control, toll gate automation and so on. In this paper, when part of character and background are dissociated, the threshold of digitalization is important and is determined using a neural network with a three-layered structure. Furthermore, in the extracted character portions, we recognize them by obtaining the features of directional line-elements. Computer simulations show that character recognition can be effectively carried out using such a method.