INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Of ACADEMIC RESEARCH Vol. 2. No. 6.

November, 2010, Part I

AN IRANIAN NATIONAL NUMBER PLATE LOCALIZATION

AND RECOGNITION SYSTEM FOR PRIVATE VEHICLES
1 2 3
Mohammad Javad Ghasemi , Hamid Reza Tajozzakerin , Ali Reza Omidian
1
Department of Computer, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch
2
Asanpardazan Co.,
3
Department of Computer, Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch, Tehran (IRAN)
*Corresponding author: Jghasemi@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Number plate recognition system has been designed and developed for numerous applications including
speed control, access restriction and so on. We propose a license plate localization and recognition system for
Iranian national number plate. We focus on recognition accuracy while the system response time is pretty
acceptable. The proposed system works based on a combination of fuzzy logic and neural network. We apply fuzzy
logic for plate segmentation, and a combination of DTCNN and MLP neural networks for character recognition. We
calculate three parameters of recognition, error and rejection rates, and present as a measure of assessing the
presented method. The results of this study show that the system is able to identify national number of the private
vehicle plates, with an accuracy of approximately 97%.

Key words: National number plate recognition; Image processing; Multi layer perception network; Discrete
time cellular neural network; Fuzzy logic

1. INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, automatic number plate recognition, which is briefly called ANPR, is a new technology that
works based on digital image processing, neural networks, fussy logic and many other techniques. Application of
this system can be divided to several cases [1, 2]:

1) The system could be used in the parking entrance to compute the parking fees automatically.
2) If there are such devices as auto fuel pump, it will be possible to register the plate number of those cars
which have not paid the fuel costs.
3) The ANPR system could be used in restricted areas to apply security requirements.
4) Transport systems may use the system to measure the travel time and for toll payment.
5) The system could be used in railway traffic control and management and so on.

Additionally the ANPR system is able to compare the recognized license plate with the database of stolen
vehicle number plates. Of course the system is much faster than a police officer and apparently much faster and
more accurate. Figure 1 shows some application of ANPR system.
If in an application as parking entrance, plate number recognition fails, the stored images can examined by
an expert, and the expert can extract and enter the plate information manually. In contrast, some other applications
as access control need higher precision because incorrect recognition means lack of service to the owner of the
car.
While the ANPR system have a wide variety of applications, there are many challenges in its
implementation and this is why it is still an active research field.
There are many destructive factors that have a negative result on the process of license plate recognition.
Halina and Bartosz in [3] divided these factors into a few groups which are listed below:

 Weather conditions,
 Lighting conditions,
 License plate placement in the picture,
 Vehicle movement,
 Mechanical plate damages,
 Other captions in the picture.
 Vehicle's angle with camera
 Color of the installed plate compared to the vehicle's color

Environmental problems are one of the most important destructive factors in the process of recognition.
Weather and lighting conditions of environment have a great impact on the quality of the received images. Dirt,
screws and bolts make the resultant image harder to recognize.
The author in the mentioned paper suggests using better lightening and specialistic equipment for recording
the car picture in other to help to develop a reliable optical character recognizer (OCR).

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Fig. 1. Some application of ANPR system

One of the best ways to reduce the negative effect of the above mentioned destructive effects is to
syntactically and geometrically analyze the result. Fortunately in Iran as a result of the selection and compulsion of
national plates for all vehicles, the diversity of plates considerably reduced in recent years. Having specification of
the national plate and applying it to the recognition system would lead to increase recognition speed and detection
accuracy. Our system is designed on the basis of the national plate and the features that we extract from the
national plate. Figure 2 shows some input image of our system.
Here in Iran lots of work done on the area of number plate recognition. The authors in [4, 5] separated the
characters using local thresholding and then recognize letters, numbers, and the city names using two separate
neural networks. In [6] Sobel filter used to separate the plate and neural network methods and HU moments to
recognize characters. In these researches, there focus was on the recognition different types of plates and there
was no clear report on the accuracy of designed systems. The authors of [7] improved their previous work and
presented a report of its accurate and performance. Their system accuracy was nearly 95% that was calculated
through testing the system in different conditions. In [8], a cascade method is employed to improve the localization
block speed. In [9] considering the blue color in the national plate localization it done in the RGB domain. In [10, 11]
other number plate recognition system are presented and the focus are on localization block. Authors of [12] used
a combination of RFID and image processing to identify the vehicle. Their focus in this research was on presenting
a new model to increase efficiency of the vehicle recognition system. In [13], authors presented a comprehensive
system that has the ability to identify different type of plate. Then, the system optimized for national plate and
achieved a better accuracy.
In the second section of this paper, we present an overview of the plate recognition system. We describe
segmentation of the plate image in the third section.
The fourth section will focus on how to recognize the plate's contents. The rule-control block will be introduced in
the fifth section.
Finally, the last section will express the result of using the proposed method in national plate recognition.
Finally, conclusions and some headlines for future research will be described.

2. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

ANPR systems usually are based on some primary steps to recognize number plate. Figure 3 gives a
schematic overview of the ANPR system which consists of three main units:
At the first step, we improve the image quality by applying some common image processing techniques and
prepare it for further processing. Then we reduce the amount of noise of the input image by applying two

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Fig. 2. Some example of input pictures

consecutive filters [2, 14]. Of course, it is more practical to use more appropriate camera in other to reduce the
need for these image quality enhancement techniques and decrees the response time.
The output image of the first block enters the plate localization module, to find the location of the plate.
Considering the ambiguous nature of localization algorithms, we used fuzzy logic for recognizing plate location [1,
2, 15, 16].

Fig. 3. Block diagram of number plate recognition system

In the recognizing block, we used two separate types of neural network for character recognition: The first
neural network is the "Discrete-Time Cellular Neural Network" (DTCNN) whose is used to extract features of the
individual symbol images on the plate. The second neural network is the "Multi-Layer Perception" (MLP) which is
used to recognize the symbols. The MLP is a supervised neural network that has multiple inputs and multiple
outputs and layer of nodes/neurons.
MLPs consist of several layers of nodes, interconnected through weighted acyclic arcs from each
preceding layer to the following, without lateral or feedback connections.
To increase the system accuracy, we do some syntactical analysis that checks the characters against
specific rules over the output of the final block; If this output has the predefined characteristics of the national plate,
we mark it as a correctly recognized number plate otherwise we reject it.

3. PLATE SEGMENTATION

As noted earlier, in the stage of plate segmentation, we process the image received from the localization
stage to identify the plate location [2, 17].
If the vehicle has a small deviation from its line at the time of image capturing, the plate in the resulting
image might have some orientation. This is the cause of inability to locate the plate in many of automated number
plate recognition systems. Figure 4 shows vehicles traffic, and our proposed method of installing cameras and their
location relative to the road. Using the method of this paper, there is more success in finding the plate position.

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We fix the plate orientation and skew and adjust its dimensions to satisfy the requirement processing size.
There may be more than one candidate region for plate location. To find the exact region and eliminate the
other regions, some criteria tests are applied to the image by filtering operation.
Output of this block is a single separated rectangle in which a plate is located, and this picture is considered
as input of the recognizing block. We use the following characteristics to identify plate location using fuzzy logic
method [3, 4, 18]:

1) The plate background which is white and a local feature for Iranian national number plate.
2) The internal and structural composition of the plate that is considered general feature.

The characteristics above express what we need in applying the fuzzy logic techniques. Thus for each pixel
of the image, we define two features of whiteness and neighbor texture. To complete the process of applying fuzzy
logic algorithm, we use the following steps:

1. Images captured from vehicle are manually processed and we extract the plate for each image. The
number of these images must be enough not to compromise the integrity of the membership function.
2. Membership function of the feature of whiteness: We obtain membership function of the first feature (i.e.
being white) with the help of a histogram-based method. We extract RGB values of pixels and create a table of
frequency of colors. Thus, we can compute the number of presence of a special color in the plates that we have to
manually extract. We normalize the table, and degree of membership of each color with the highest number of
repetition. As a result of these steps, we obtain the membership function of whiteness.
3. Membership function of the internal composition: To obtain membership function of internal combination
feature, we use values of gray levels belonging to its eight neighbors.

Fig. 4. Proposed configuration for installing cameras.

To segment and separate plate from other parts of the image, we use the fuzzy C-Means clustering
algorithm. Generally, there are two types of clusters which are clusters with plate and without plate. These types of
clusters are separated using the following steps:
1. We mark every rectangular cluster, whose relative sizes (i.e. ratios of length to width of the rectangular)
are conformed to the plate size as a candidate for a cluster that has the plate.
2. We separate the characters within the plate by method of thresholding [2, 19]. Output of this operation is
a binary image. In the resulting binary image, we look for connected blocks because every character continuously
appears with a color.
Any continuous part is potentially considered as a character that may or may not be desirable for us. We
consider these parts as a character if they appear in the predefined number of eight, because the number of
characters in the plate is fixed, equal to eight. The negative impact of this method is that due to low image quality a
part of the plate may be removed in thresholding.
Although the number of continuous characters in the plate is equal to eight, but we can review those blocks
having seven or six continuous characters as an output the absence of a better candidate for real plate. This
additional processing slows down the system, useful information can be provided in some applications.

4. CHARACTER RECOGNITION

Character recognition is the third block forming the intelligent recognition system. A continuous sequence of
characters and symbols which is identified in the segmentation block is applied to the input of character recognition
block.
Although OCR is the fundamental technology used in ANPR and provides the capability to convert the
registration number into the equaling ASCII code but as the input image is dependant to the vehicle's angle with

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(a) Input picture (b) The input picture after (c) Extracted number plate (d) Extracted characters after
plate segmentation thresholding

Fig. 5. The car picture in different recognition stages

camera, color, location of the installed plate and environmental problems, the OCR algorithm is not able to
recognize national plate characters. Neural networks method is known as the most common techniques to
recognize the printed characters.
In this block, we use two types of neural network to process the data. To achieve more accurate results, the
classification is based on the features of each character instead of individual bits [15, 16, 20]. We extracted four
features from each character using the DTCNN neural network which are: horizontal image, vertical image, the
number of continuous horizontal dots and the number of continuous vertical dots. To extract each of these features,
we need a separate DTCNN neural network. Output of these neural networks enters into a MLP neural network in
which has a hidden layer.
In this network, the possibility related for each character appears on the output of corresponding neuron. If
the method succeed in recognizing a character, one of the neurons will have a very high probability (more than
85%) in compression to others, and the rest will have a low probability (less than 25%). Figure 5 shows the vehicle
picture in different recognition steps.

5. SYNTACTICAL/GEOMETRICAL ANALYSIS

We consider the section of regularity analysis to control the recognized plate. As our system is designed on
the basis of the national plate, the following features that are defined by the lawmaker are extracted. These
features are:
1. Apparent features: Color: White, Shape: rectangular, Dimensions: 11 * 51 (cm)
2. Nature features: There are some basic regulations for license plates in Iran: The number plate consists
of eight symbols with the combination of NNANNNNN in which N and A represents a digit and a letter respectively.
All of them are located on a horizontal line, and the first six symbols are in the same size.
3. There is no "zero" digit in the plates.
4. Some letters like "R", "Z" doesn’t exist in the plate.
We control these circumstances in the output of our own system. It should be noted that in the section of
recognition, we consider all letters, and delete the plates with non-allowed letters in this block. The advantage of
this method is the ability to identify all possible contents, increase flexibility and predict the behavior of the system
in all cases.
It should be considered that selecting more number of control rules will increase the system accuracy but
has negative impact on system speed.
experimental results
We used the Image Processing and the Neural Network Toolbox of MATLAB R2008a for development of
our work. We used a computer with 2 GHz dual core processor from Intel Company with a 2MByte cache and
2GByte memory. Graphic card is NVida GeForce system with a 256 MB memory, and operating system is
Windows XP with SP2.
To evaluate our system performance, we use three parameters: 1) Recognition rate 2) Error rate 3)
Rejection rate. These three parameters are defined according to the following equations:

N um b er of th e co rrectly reco gn itio n ch aracters

R ecog nition rate=
T o tal nu m b er of th e fo u nd characters
(1 )
Number of the incorrectly Recognition characters
Error rate= (2)
Total number of the found characters

Number of the non-accepted characters

Rejection rate= (3)
Total number of the found characters

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The above equations are based on the "character". To get more realistic results, first we train the system
and then a database of 100 license plate images to test the proposed system.
The system failed to localize 15 images due to reasons as dirtiness of the plate, very low image quality and
improper camera angle, our system. In the remaining 85 images, recognition rate, error rate and rejection rate were
97.2%, 1.2% and 1.6% (for each character), respectively.
In some papers, accuracy is expressed based on the number of the images recognized. Obviously, this
parameter increases the number reported for accuracy, because the algorithm may fail to recognize more than one
character in an image. The presented method is able to recognize those plates which are located in the image
input at an angular position.

6. CONCLUSIONS

This paper introduces a number plate recognition system that is based on neural networks and fussy logic.
Figure 6 shows a detailed block diagram of our system. The proposed number plate recognition system. According
to our simulations, we concluded that there are two sources of errors in our system:
1) The first source, which is more effective, is the error in the plate segmentation step, which originates
from such factors as plate curvature and dirt.
2) The second source is in the thresholding step that decrease if we use multi-value thresholding.

Fig. 6. ANPR detailed operation

In this paper, we applied national plate of private vehicles to the input of recognition system. Fortunately the
difference between plate of public and governmental vehicle and private vehicles plates is restricted to the
background color; for instance, the background color of state organizations-related vehicles is red. This system has
the required flexibility to recognize these plates. There are other types of plate in Iran (such as political or military
plates), which needs more change to be able to identify them.
Here we focused on the system performance but with a bit change on the system we will get some
enhancement on the response time. Preprocessing stage is considered as the first candidate to improve the
response time and to reduce the number of rejected plates. Reduction in rejection rate would lead to increase the
system accuracy.
The possibility of accepting a video in compressed format and the ability of compressed domain processing
has great impact on the speed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by a grant from Islamic Azad University-Roudehen Branch, Tehran, Iran. We
would like to thank the staff at Islamic Azad University of Roudehen for their help and support.

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