Fast Cartoon-Texture Decomposition Filtering Based License Plate Detection Method

Abstract

Vehicle license plate detection is an important step in automatic license plate recognition, which is prone to be influenced by the background interference and complex environment conditions. It is known that cartoon-texture decomposition split an image into geometric cartoon and texture component, which can remove background interference away from the vehicle image. In this paper, we introduce a fast cartoon-texture decomposition filter into the detection process. Combining the edge detection, morphological filtering and Radon transform based tilt correction method, we formulate a new license plate detection algorithm. Experiment results confirm that the proposed algorithm can remove background interference away, inhibit the emergence of fake license plates, and improve the detection accuracy. Moreover, there is no inner loop iteration in the new algorithm, so it is fast and high-efficiency.