Skip to main content

Detecting, Tracking and Recognizing License Plates

  • Conference paper
Computer Vision – ACCV 2007 (ACCV 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 4844))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel real-time framework which enables detection, tracking and recognition of license plates from video sequences. An efficient algorithm based on analysis of Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detection results allows localization of international license plates in single images without the need of any learning scheme. After a one-time detection of a plate it is robustly tracked through the sequence by applying a modified version of the MSER tracking framework which provides accurate localization results and additionally segmentations of the individual characters. Therefore, tracking and character segmentation is handled simultaneously. Finally, support vector machines are used to recognize the characters on the plate. An experimental evaluation shows the high accuracy and efficiency of the detection and tracking algorithm. Furthermore, promising results on a challenging data set are presented and the significant improvement of the recognition rate due to the robust tracking scheme is proved.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Shapiro, V., Gluhchev, G., Dimov, D.: Towards a multinational car license plate recognition system 17(3), 173–183 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Jia, W., Zhang, H., He, X., Piccardi, M.: Mean shift for accurate license plate localization. In: ITSC. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, pp. 566–571. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Dlagnekov, L., Belongie, S.: Recognizing cars. Technical Report CS2005-0833, UCSD University of California, San Diego (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Matas, J., Zimmermann, K.: Unconstrained licence plate and text localization and recognition. In: ITSC. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vienna, Austria, pp. 572–577. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Rahman, C., Badawy, W., Radmanesh, A.: A real time vehicle’s license plate recognition system. In: AVSS. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, pp. 163–166. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Matas, J., Zimmermann, K.: Unconstrained licence plate detection. In: ITSC. Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, pp. 572–577 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Donoser, M., Bischof, H.: Efficient maximally stable extremal region (MSER) tracking. In: CVPR. Proceedings of Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 553–560 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Matas, J., Chum, O., Urban, M., Pajdla, T.: Robust wide baseline stereo from maximally stable extremal regions. In: BMVC. Proceedings of British Machine Vision Conference, pp. 384–393 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Mikolajczyk, K., Schmid, C.: A performance evaluation of local descriptors. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) 27(10), 1615–1630 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Zhang, H., Jia, W., He, X., Wu, Q.: Learning-based license plate detection using global and local features. In: ICPR. Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 1102–1105 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Najman, L., Couprie, M.: Quasi-linear algorithm for the component tree. In: SPIE Vision Geometry XII, vol. 5300, pp. 98–107 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Matas, J., Zimmermann, K.: A new class of learnable detectors for categorisation. In: SCIA. Proceedings of Scandinavian Conference of Image Analysis, pp. 541–550 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Vapnik, V.N.: The nature of statistical learning theory. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, USA (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Zheng, L., He, X.: Number plate recognition based on support vector machines. In: AVSS 2006. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Video and Signal Based Surveillance, Washington, DC, USA, p. 13. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Schölkopf, B., Smola, A.J.: Learning with Kernels: Support Vector Machines, Regularization, Optimization, and Beyond. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA (2001)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Yasushi Yagi Sing Bing Kang In So Kweon Hongbin Zha

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Donoser, M., Arth, C., Bischof, H. (2007). Detecting, Tracking and Recognizing License Plates. In: Yagi, Y., Kang, S.B., Kweon, I.S., Zha, H. (eds) Computer Vision – ACCV 2007. ACCV 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4844. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76390-1_44

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76390-1_44

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76389-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76390-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics