An Efficient Approach for Vehicle Number Plate Recognition in Pakistan

Abstract

Introduction: Recognition of Vehicle License Number Plates (VLNP) is an important task. It is valuable in numerous applications, such as entrance admission, security, parking control, road traffic control, and speed control. An ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is a system in which the image of the vehicle is captured through high definition cameras. The image is then used to detect vehicles of any type (car, van, bus, truck, and bike, etc.), its’ color (white, black, blue, etc.), and its’ model (Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic etc.). Furthermore, this image is processed using segmentation and OCR techniques to get the vehicle registration number in form of characters. Once the required information is extracted from VLNP, this information is sent to the control center for further processing. Aim: ANPR is a challenging problem, especially when the number plates have varying sizes, the number of lines, fonts, background diversity, etc. Different ANPR systems have been suggested for different countries, including Iran, Malaysia, and France. However, only a limited work exists for Pakistan vehicles. Therefore, in this study, we aim to propose a novel ANPR framework for Pakistan VLNP recognition. Methods: The proposed ANPR system functions in three different steps: (i) - Number Plate Localization (NPL); (ii)- Character Segmentation (CS); and (iii)- Optical Character Recognition (OCR), involving template-matching mechanism. The proposed ANPR approach scans the number plate and instantly checks against database records of vehicles of interest. It can further extract the real=time information of driver and vehicle, for instance, license of the driver and token taxes of vehicles are paid or not, etc. Results: Finally, the proposed ANPR system has been evaluated on several real-time images from various formats of number plates practiced in Pakistan territory. In addition to this, the proposed ANPR system has been compared with the existing ANPR systems proposed specifically for Pakistani licensed number plates. Conclusion: The proposed ANPR Model has both time and money-saving profit for law enforcement agencies and private organizations for improving homeland security. There is a need to expand the types of vehicles that can be detected: trucks, buses, scooters, bikes. This technology can be further improved to detect the crashed vehicle’s number plate in an accident and alert the closest hospital and police station about the accident, thus saving lives.

Development of ANPR Framework for Pakistani Vehicle Number Plates Using Object Detection and OCR

“…e proposed research work is targeting the identification and visualization of Pakistani number plates by using the OCR Tesseract library. We compared our ANPR framework with an existing ANPR method involving the KNN approach proposed for Pakistani number plates [21].…”

“…e introduced method was tested on 50 images and had a margin of improvement for further implementation in a real-time environment. A rational methodology especially for Pakistani number plates recognition is designed in [21]. A dataset consists of 900 images collected from six different regions of Pakistan.…”

“…In Figure 13, we inferred by using the preprocessing methods of [21] on our images that their pipeline did not recognize the characters well due to the poor localization. Further, their preprocessing techniques are only applicable to car vehicle types.…”

“…In the view of Table 4, when we applied their [21] ANPR framework on our dataset, the processing computation time taken per image is approximately 44 seconds with an average score of 9% using the fuzzywuzzy library. It did not recognize the plate characters well, due to poor localization done by edge detection.…”

Vehicle Number Plate Detection and Recognition Techniques: A Review

“…In [58], an innovative vehicle number plate recognition method using OCR and template matching strategies for the Pakistani language has been suggested by Rehman. Several real-time images from different formats of number plates used in Pakistan were evaluated by the proposed ANPR system.…”