Matrics, a Car License Plate Recognition System

Matrics is a system for recognition of car license plates. It works on standard PC equipment with low-priced capture devices and achieves real-time performance (10 frames per second) with state of the art accuracy: the character error rate is below 1% and the plate error rate is below 3%. The recognition process is divided in two phases: plate localization and plate decoding. The system finds the plate analyzing the connected components of the image after binarization. The decoding algorithm is a Two Level process which uses fast template-based classification techniques in its first stage and optimal segmentation in the second stage. On the whole, the system represents a significant improvement over a previous version which was based on HMM.