An effective method for plate number recognition

In this paper, a novel plate number localization algorithm called Secondary Positioning (SP) is proposed and tested on locally acquired data set. The rough position of a plate number is identified at the first stage by searching red light regions in HSV colour space, and then an accurate position of the plate number is localized in the second stage by finding out vertical edge of the plate number. Template matching which is implemented for recognizing individual character incorporates correction coefficient calculated between the templates and testing images. The test dataset includes two subsets from our local plate numbers, namely, 120 images are used for plate number localization, and 80 images for plate number recognition. The precisions obtained from plate number localization and recognition are approximately 75% and 70% respectively, indicating the performances are better than expected compared to the relevant contexts from the literature survey.