Malaysian car plates recognition using freeman chain codes and characters' features

Abstract

Car plate recognition (CPR) system is an important application of image detection and recognition used to overcome the challenges of monitoring modern day traffic. The Freeman chain codes (FCC) is applied in this research to study on the accuracy and efficiency of this technique as an alternative recognition approach to recognize characters on car plates because of its ability to recognize characters and digits successfully. Therefore, this paper is mainly focused on conducting an experiment using FCC to test on its accuracy and efficiency in characters recognition with the support of characters' features because FCC alone does not provide an accurate and efficient recognition result. The result shows that the combination of FCC with characters' features (FCCwF) yields 95% recognition accuracy. As a conclusion, FCC can be an accurate and efficient technique only if the image quality is high and without any noise which might disturbing the recognition process or if it is combined with another technique. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.