Car license plates extraction and recognition based on connected components analysis and HMM decoding

Abstract

A system for finding and recognizing car license plates is presented. The finding of the plates is based on the analysis of connected components of four different binarizations of the image. No assumptions are made about illumination and camera angle, and only mild assumptions regarding the size of the plate in the image are made. Recognition is performed by means of Hidden Markov Models. Experiments on a database of Spanish number plates show the feasibility of the proposed approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.