Gate Control System for New Iraqi License Plate

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to license plate localization and recognition. A proposed method is designed to control the opening of door gate based on the recognition of the license plates number in Iraq. In general the system consists of four stages; Image capturing, License plate cropping, character segmentation and character recognition. In the first stage, the vehicle photo is taken fromstandard camera placed on the door gate with a specific distance from the front of vehicle to be processed by our system. Then, the detection method searches for the matching of the license plate in the image with a standard plate. The segmentation stage is performed by is using edge detection. Then character recognition, done by comparing with template standard numbers and letters used in the Iraqi plate. The system was implemented using Matlab (R2012a) and shows accurate performance results reached 93.33%.

Comparative Study between Iraqi and EU Vehicles License Plates in view of Segmentation and Recognition

“…The proposed system used in [5] has four major stages as shown in Fig.2. Each of these stages may contain many sub-stages.…”

“…The Iraqi License plate comprises several regions and sections that are used as special objects in the recognizable proof of the plate for extraction. Fig.1 shows Iraqi license plate parts [5]. In the EU, the common design consists of a blue strip on the left side of the plate.…”

“…The process that applied to find the average color of the background in the region (7) to recognize the type of the car was done by taking the average value for Red, Green and blue pixels, then according to equations, the color will be defined. For example, equation 2 will determine if the color is yellow or not [5].…”

“…Table 2. Comparison among different types of recognition for Iraqi license plate System Total Recognition % Shihab [2] 97 Abbas [3] 98.245 Abed [4] 92 Tawfeeq [5] 93.33 Table 3.Comparison among different types of recognition for EU plate System Total Recognition % Janowski [10] 80 Li [11] 80 Zhu [12] 87.33 Sarfaz [13] 95 Donoser [14] 94 Abdulbaki [15] In [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] the license plate was projected vertically to define the boundaries of the characters, then horizontally to detect each character. One easily can recognize from Table 4 and above, that the process of segmentation in Iraq license plate should pass through three steps, first for Arabic characters, second for English characters, and third for car type, while in EU plate, only a single stage will needed.…”

“…Abed et.al, in [4] used Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Bee Colony Optimization Algorithm (BCOA) to recognize the shape of numbers and letters after applying vertical and horizontal histogram projection for character segmentation. Tawfeeq et.al, in [5] designed an approach for gate control system which uses edge detection and vertical line detection for segmentation and template matching for characters recognition. They use the colors in the plate to verify its type instead of text recognition.…”