A Fast Algorithm for License Plate Detection

In this paper we propose a method for detection of the car license plates in 2D gray images. In this method we first estimate the density of vertical edges in the image. The regions with high density vertical edges are good candidates for license plates. In order to filter out clutter regions possessing similar feature in the edge density image, we design a match filter which models the license plate pattern. By applying the proposed filter on the edge density image followed by a thresholding procedure, the locations of license plate candidates are detected. We finally extract the boundary of license plate(s) using the morphological operations. The result of experiments on car images (taken under different imaging conditions especially complex scenes) confirms the ability of the method for license plate detection. As the complexity of the proposed algorithm is low, it is considerably fast.

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