A practical license plate recognition system for real-time environments

A computer vision system to recognize license plates of vehicles in real-time environments is presented in this study. The images of moving vehicles are taken with a digital camera and analyzed in real-time. An artificial neural network (ANN) system is used to locate the area and position of the license plate. The system has the following stages: (i) Image acquisition and determination of the location of the vehicle license plate (VLP), (ii) segmentation of the VLP into separate characters using image processing techniques, and (iii) recognition of each symbol in VLP using a feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) and assembly of the characters. Performance results are presented at the end.