Travel Time Measurement in Real-Time using Automatic Number Plate Recognition for Malaysian Environment

Travel time is a basic measure in transportation studies. It is used for performance measures of the developed transportation system. Among many other advanced techniques, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) has gained lots of intentions because it is a non-intrusive approach and this system do not required any additional vehicle identification need to be installed to the vehicle. In this paper, a new real-time ANPR system is presented. The proposed ANPR system has been developed to suit with traffic environment in Malaysia. The development of the ANPR system consists of several processing steps such as vehicle detection, number plate localization and extraction, character segmentation and recognition. A number of tests were done in order to measure the performance and capability of the developed ANPR system. Based on the results, the system is reliable and robust and its capability to measure travel time indicated that it have huge potential to be use in traffic and transportation studies.