A robust method to authenticate car license plates using segmentation and ROI based approach

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges faced by the automatic recognition systems over the conventional systems by implementing a novel approach for detecting and recognizing the vehicle license plates in order to increase the security of the vehicles. This will also increase the societal discipline among vehicle users. Design/methodology/approach From a methodological point of view, the proposed system works in three phases which includes the pre-processing of the input image from the database, applying segmentation to the processed image, and finally extracting and recognizing the image of the license plate. Findings The proposed paper provides an analysis that demonstrates the correctness of the algorithm to correctly capture the license plate using performance metrics such as detection rate and false positive rate. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm detects vehicle license plates and provides detection rate of 93.34 percent with false positive rate of 6.65 percent. Research limitations/implications The proposed license plate detection system eliminates the need of manually used systems for managing the traffic by installing the toll-booths on freeways and bridges. The design implemented in this paper attempts to capture the license plate by using three phase detection process that helps to increase the level of security and contribute in making a sustainable city. Originality/value This paper presents a distinctive approach to detect the license plate of the vehicles using the various image processing techniques such as dilation, grey-scale conversion, edge processing, etc. and finding the region of interest of the segmented image to capture the license plate of the vehicles.