An attempt at license plate recognition Using edge tracing and tangent curves
Steps in recognition 1. Finding The License Plate 2. Finding And Representing Digits 3. Matching
Finding The License Plate • Eliminating all colors on the wrong side of the spectrum. Easy done using colormaps to leave only 2 colors white and yellow.
Finding The Digits • Edge Tracing • Color Segmentation How to save the information we found? ? ? • Edge chains. • Curve orientation. • Polyline fitting. • Using a method similar to Houghman and Clows, by segmenting the shape into a grid and labeling the type of curve in each segment (concave arc, corner, straight line etc)
Finding the digits • Edge tracing over the filtered plate, going clockwise around the pixel edge until back in the starting point. • Averaging the degree over line segments and marking a feature point when a difference in degree between to segments has passed a certain threshold.
Tangent Curve • Marking the curve at each pixel during the trace. • Spline interpolation and normalization by arclength • Re-Sampling
Tangent Curve
Matching • Give high score for low distance tangent curves. • Needs to be checked for different orientations. • Longest Common Sub. Sequence – No Help
Results – Needs improvement
Possible Improvments • Check the tangent curve distance for different orienations. • Better digit-plate segmentation • Applying a grid on the curve features and comparing grids in addition to curve distance to compose a more accurate score