Building a Character Recognition System for Vehicle Applications

Abstract

Today number plate for vehicles is very important for their verification of its owner Id, address, vehicle identification and or for security purposes. Number plates are of different shapes, colors and sizes in different countries. In India, number Plates are of white background with black foreground color. By number plate we can identify the number by using image processing technique. By using image processing an image of the vehicle is captured to identify the number. We can also check the location and detect the non-permit holders of the stolen vehicles. The OCR, i.e., Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique is used to read the characters from the image captured of the vehicle. Character Recognition is the one of the form of the OCR. In which we can read the characters from the vehicle number plate and use this for the identification of the owner of the vehicle with its detail like name of the owner, Place (state and district), the date of registration of the vehicle and its registration number and vehicle type, i.e., Either it is four wheeler or two wheeler. We have proposed this methodology to detect or check the detail of the vehicle. The vehicle number plate is also used for the Electric tolls to collect charge of pay-per-use of highways and note down the journey time measurement and ticket collection. The camera which is used for this process is infrared camera which capture the image at all conditions of the weathers either it is day or night.