New image enhancement algorithm for car license plate recognition

Segmentation of license plate region is a key procedure in a car license plate recognition system,enhancing the plate region of the captured image and suppressing the background area can effectively reduce the difficulty of the plate segmentation task.The image used for license recognition is decomposed into a group of binary versions,and then connected regions in the binary images are labelled and their feature parameters are calculated.As the connected regions in the plate area and those in the background are very different in the calculated feature parameters,so the connected regions which likely belong to the plate area can be preserved and the others can be erased.A new image with plate region enhanced can be reconstructed from the processed binary images.In order to reduce the computation load and make the algorithm realizable,contour lines instead of connected component labelling is utilized to describe the connected regions.The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively enhance the plate area and suppress the background area,improve the plate segmentation performance.The new algorithm can be well applied in the real car license plate recognition systems.4 figs,8 refs.