CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In general, vehicles license plate number is a very unique combination of letters and numbers which can be describe as the identity card for the respective vehicle. The existence of the plate to represent each vehicle can be used in tracking system where the vehicle is identified and the owner is tracked down through the database. To do this, the recognition process to read the characters on license plate is critical. This can be done by human process, where our brain interprets the image transfer from our eyes automatically. However, there is also another way to do collect vehicle data without human intervention by designing a computerized plate recognition system.

Plate recognition system has been a very popular research topic worldwide, where various systems had been developed corresponding to the specifications of license plate system for each country. This is becausevehicle identification can be implemented in various applications that can help in controlling the access to secured area, entrance admission, security enforcement, non-stop tolling system, ticket-free parking lot, speed-limit enforcement, and road traffic control. Different approaches and techniques had been used to develop this system to achieve the best performance on the recognition percentages.

The purpose of this project is to implement and utilize the Real-Time Special Plate Recognition (R-TSPR) system developed by Samsul bin Setumin for his master thesis in UTM during year 2009 using C++ language to increase the performance of system towards real time implementation. The system will be implemented into a vehicle flow monitoring system which detect and record the inflow and outflow of vehicles at the entrance.

1.1

Problem Statement

In implementing the controlling and monitoring of the vehicles access to a restricted place, such as residential area, the current tracking system depend mostly on manual process. For example, control of the vehicle flow by issuing of car registration sticker to the registered vehicles. Monitoring of such control system can only be done manually by recording the data into the database by the security guard. The recording process is troublesome where the process of searching the respective vehicles database and recording manually time involved is needed. The process is not practical especially during the peak hours. On the other hand, by using the touch and go gate system, the entering or leaving of a registered vehicle can be recorded automatically into the database by the system automatically. However, when come to unregistered car, the recording process have to be done manually. To monitor the vehicle flow in a more effective and efficient way, an integrated real time system shall be introduced to recognize the car plate automatically and at the same time, recording the vehicle flow data into the existing database automatically or create a new database for the under unregistered vehicle for the first time enter.

1.2

Objective

The main objective of this project is to develop an integrated real time system that can detect the incoming and outgoing vehicle flow of an area. The system should also monitor and keep the record for the flow of each vehicle into the system database. To achieve this objective, the system created should be able to capture the vehicle image from the CCTV video, detect, locate and recognize the car plate number of each vehicle, match and record the inflow and outflow activity of the vehicle into the available database or create a new database if the record not found, and attach a time stamp to each data to indicate the time of the vehicle in or out of the entrance.

1.3

Scope

The system is designed mainly to recognize the different types of car plate including car, truck, bus, van and so on. However, due to the limitation to the position of video recorder to capture the sample right in front of the vehicle (perpendicular to the camera view), the detection motorcycle car plate shall not be included for the implementation of the system. In addition, the system is implemented with the assumption of the minimum noise input, in which the sample shall be a high quality video input taken during day time, which the situation of heavy rainy day and night time are not taken into consideration. The implementation of the sample video processing will be done based on the grayscale binary images using stroke analysis technique to recognize the car plate. The system is implemented on Microsoft Visio software using C++ programming language. The database used in the system will be created using MySQL software. MySQL/C++ connector will be used for the communication of the system created with the database.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Vehicle license plate recognition system as an automatic vehicle identification system has been a popular research topic in image processing field for years. The algorithms involve 4 major processes, which are image pre-processing, license plate localization, plate characters extraction, and character recognition process. Due to the difference in the various specifications to define the license plate in each country and the different language used, the application of the system developed is restricted to the country used. According to researchers, different algorithms and techniques had been designed for different license plate specifications and to achieve better performance of the recognition process.

2.1

Plate Localization Technique

License plate location is the process used to locate the position of the car plate in the image. Instead of perform image processing throughout the whole image, the position of the license plate is first determined and extracted. The recognition

process is then performed only on the extracted license plate area to reduce calculation involved. The proposal of this technique had made the implementation of the license plate recognition system in real time basispossible where the performance of the localization of plate position influence most to the execution time for whole system. If the license plate is successfully located, the successful rate for the recognition process should increase.

In year 1998, Hans A.Hegt, Ron J. De la Haye, and Nadeem A Khan had develop an High Performance License Plate Recognition System that use corners point extraction technique where the detector will detect 4 possible corners of license plate and check the spatial frequency of the plate area. In this algorithm, template matching technique is used to detect the corner of the plate. When there are four corner points detected with quadrangle shape, the spatial frequencies of the contents inside the area is checked. If the spatial frequencies detected is as expected (spatial frequencies contribute by characters), the area is verified as the license plate position.

Later in year 2000, Mei Yu, Yong Deak Kim had proposed a Korean vehicle license plate recognition system based on vertical edge matching technique to locate the position of license plate. The algorithm is based on the observations that most of the vehicles consist of more horizontal lines as compared to vertical lines. Thus, the two vertical edges of the license plate are selected to verify the four corners of the license plate. Next, a binary size-and-shape filter is used as region identification to label the region of interest. The edge area of vertical edge image is defined as a white pixel sel with eight connected neighbour pixels with each other. The filtering process will filter out the edge candidate that does not conform to predefined features as below:
y y y y

Edge area size Form beeline with predefined interval slope Similar slope where top and bottom is close to one another Ratio of width to height is about 2:1, where the possible range is between 1.4 : 1 < r < 3.3 : 1

Two vertical edges with similar height, where the ratio of the both edge is between 0.8 < r < 1.2

After all possible edge of the license plate area is detected, the area is examined with the percentage of the characters region in the area, which is refers to the white pixels in between the region. The existence of the percentage in between 10% to 40% of white pixels in the region is considered as the real license plate region. After 3 years, V. Koval, V. Turchenko, V. Kochan, A. Sachenco, G Markowsky had used iterative thresholding operation to determine the license plate region in their license plate recognition system. Using this algorithm, the object (white pixels) exist in the image is first identified, labeled, and then analyzed. The analysis is based on the geometrical characteristics of license plate, which include
y y y y

Height Weight Total pixel in the object Presence of characters

In the proposed system, the license plate is verified with the condition that the proportion of maximum width and height is 0.1 to 0.25, and the total number of pixels in the object is between 2000 to 8000 pixels.

In year 2005, Matas and Zimmermann had proposed a region-based license plate detector in their paper which detects the linear combination of character-like region as the license plate position. The detector will first decompose the image into several threshold-separable regions that contains objects of interest. Machine learning method is used in this detector to detect and classify the extremal regions into relevant (character-like) or irrelevant region. This can be achieved by training of the classifier with examples of regions, which consists of letters from given categories such as font, digits, and capitals. The real license plate position is verified as the longest linear spatial configuration between the spatial regions.

One year later, BalazsEnyedi, LajosKonyha and KalmanFazekas used horizontal and vertical analysis to locate the license plate from the image in their real time number plate localization algorithms. In this algorithm, the region with highest intensity variation that matches with the predefined window size is selected as the license plate position. This is determined by the observations where the high contrast area in a vehicle is usually the license plate area, for example, Malaysia license plate with black background and white license characters. Besides, frequent changes of the horizontal intensity with sharp variations can be detected when the letters and the numbers presented in same vertical levels.

First, the system will first detect the intensity variation for each row. The adjacent row that exhibits the biggest variations is selected as the region of interest. Next, the possible horizontal level of the plate region is determined by the highest variation area from the intensity variation of each row. After bandpass filtering, the possible position of vertical edge for license plate can be determined by the row with highest amplitude region. The lower boundary and the upper boundary of the vertical edge is the first local minimal found from the highest magnitude. On the other hand, the horizontal edge is detected by analyzing the average value of the curve. A maximum distance between the characters in the license plate is estimated in advanced where the possible area detected that are too close to each other are merged. The real number plate position is selected form the license plate where the ratios of the vertical and horizontal edge fulfill the predefined criterion.

Table1Intensity histogram to determine the position of car plate

2.2

Character Segmentation

Character segmentation is the process of to separate the characters exist in license plate into one character per area. The process is proposed in order to simplify the character recognition process where the template used in analysis can be highly decreased. However, there also exists system that discards this process, reorder the segmentation and identification process using spationigtron model as recognition method as describe in Real Time Car Plate Recognition Improvement system based on Spationigtron Neural Network as proposed byDariuszKrl and MaciejMaksym in year 2008.

Early in year 1994, a. Eun Ryun Lee, PyeongKee Kim, Hang Joon Kim in their paper of Automatic Recognition of a car license plate using color image processing use license plate histogram and the histogram of each color to segment the plate region into foreground that consists of characters and background area represents the space between the characters. Using this algorithm, the input image is converted to four color groups, which is green, white, red, and otherwise group, the horizontal and vertical color histogram of the four groups is calculated and a HV (horizontal and vertical) histogram is plotted. The character region is extracted based on the HV histogram by determine the histogram of each characters color.

Similarly, during year 2003, Choudhury A. Rahman, WaelBadawy, Ahmad Radmanesh use horizontal and vertical intensity projection in their real time vehicles license plate recognition system to segment characters exist in license plate. The algorithm is based on the pattern matching towards the horizontal concentration of colour. The effectiveness of the system varies with the font use as the template and the font used on license plate where in this case, Arial font is used. Various histograms of letters A to Z and digits 0 to 9 arestored as templates, which include the histogram for:

Horizontal Histogram of:

y y y y y y y y

Vertical Histogram of:

y y y y y y y

Full size Lower half Upper half Lower one third Upper one third Lower one forth Upper one forth Upper two third

Full size Left half Right half Left one third Right one third Left one forth Right one forth

Table 2 List of Histogram created as templates The obtained histogram of the license plate was then compared to the template to determine the area of each character as shown in figure below:

Table3 Example of Character Extraction using horizontal and vertical intensity projection technique

Later in year 2006, V. Shapiro, G. Gluhchev, and D. Dimov use the concept of adaptive iterative thresholding and analysis of connected component analysis of

license plate for character segmentation. In this system, a character clipper is introduces to separate license plate region into isolated rectangular box containing one character as the assumption that no overlapping exist between characters. The algorithm of the character clipper is as bellows:

Table4Chacracter Clipping algorithms

Table5 Sequential Steps of plate segmentation with adaptive threshold = 3

At the same year, A. Banerjee, K. Basu and A. Konar in their paper of Desigining a Real Time System For Car Number Detection Using Discrete Hopfield Network propose a character segmentation algorithm based on vertical scanning on

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binary image to search for stretch of white pixel. In this system, the gap or the space between the consecutive characters is utilized to extract individual characters. Firstly, vertical scanning is performed on the binary image to search for the stretch of white pixels. A value that compatible to the dimension of number plate is set to examine the stretch. The top position of the character is determined when the stretch exceeds the preset value, and so for the bottom of number plate. Next, horizontal scanning is performed on entire image and the positions of the individual characters are extracted according to the gap exist between consecutive characters.

2.3

Character Recognition

Character recognition is the most important process in the whole license plate recognition system. The system cannot be applied in real world as vehicle identification without the recognition process involved even though the position of plate is successfully detected and the character in segmented from the plate region. Throughout the various techniques used in the recognition process, template matching and neural networks approach are most common used by the researchers worldwide.

Template matching is a technique used to compare the character on the image with the database for each possible character to find the best match. At year 1999, Naito, T. Tsukada, T. Yamada, K. Kozuka, K. and Yamamoto, S had developed a recognition method for inclined license plate using template matching approach. Several sets of the templates are prepared in advanced with the same letters and digits with different inclined angels as in figure below:

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Table6 Inclined templates designed

According to the incline of the plate and the hypothesis formed by the alignment of the characters extracted, appropriate templates are utilized for the template matching process. On the other hand, Mei Yuand Yong Deak Kim in year 2000 also used template matching in their system of Korea car plate recognition. Because of the uniform license plate specification presented in the system, template matching is employed as relatively less computation is involved compared with neural networks. The template prepared is according to the 15 region names and 70 usage codes used in old Korea car plate, and the corresponding 14 and 25 for new license plate. The samples of template used are as follows:

Table7Korean License Plate Template

The template is divided into four, one for the first character, second for second character, third for the usage code, and forth for digits 0-9. Each character segmented is compared to the corresponding template set, and the template with the smallest distance to the unknown character is regarded as that character.

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In year 2006, A. Banerjee, K. Basu and A. Konar used Discrete Hopfield Network, a modification of neural network approach for license plate recognition. The system is implemented by converting the character matric into row vectors and served as the input to the trained neural network. When there is perfect match found, the value of the row vector is set by all zeros.

To achieve this algorithm, the maximum size of individual character is found and the characters are mapped into the 2 dimensional matrices corresponding to the maximum size of the characters. The 2D matrices are then converted into row vectors where the second row of the matrices is appended to the first row, the third row to the second row and so on. Next, a neural network with neuron equal to the size of the row matrix is designed. The system function by subtracting the row vector of the nth input character with each of the row vectors corresponding to the nth characters of the cars used for training of network. The resultant row vector will have all zeros value for the perfect match between input pattern and training pattern. When there is no perfect match detected, the difference between the input pattern and training patterns is searched andthe resultant vector with minimum nonzero terms is treated as the matched character.

At year 2007, Clemens Arth, Florian Limberger, and Horst Bischof used One Vs All and tree-like structure recognition base on Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification for character recognition process. For one vs all approach, a k binary SVM is trained where k-1 class having negative label while there exist only one positive label. The target class is then determined by the largest value of the decision function. On the other hand, in tree-like structure, the characters are divided according to the shape of each character. The decision is made layer by layer until the final character class. The example of the tree-like structure proposed is shown in figure.

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Table8Tree-Like Structure Classification

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

3.1

Introduction In this project, the real time license plate recognition and monitoring system

will be implemented based on two input videos taken at the main entrance of UTM which represents the vehicles in flow and out flow. The video will be pre-processed in advanced to extract the time frame images from the video input by rate of 5 frames per second with the assumption that the speed of the vehicles is slow enough at the entrance. The extracted image will go through various image morphology processes to remove the unwanted noise presented in the image. Next, the position of the license plate will be located by the rule-based candidate filtering algorithm. The characters presented in the license plate area will be extracted by cropping the license plate area vertically according to its width. The segmented character will then be performed stroke analysis to determine the characters presented. Finally, the license number recognized will be recorded into the database that consists of the information for the registered vehicles and the inflow and outflow records for the vehicles. A time stamp will be inserted to the database as a record of time when the vehicle detected.

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Video of vehicles flows (in and out) Input

Extract time frame from video with 5 frames per second

Image preprocessing and location of license

Extract letters and digits from located car plate area.

Insert time stamp to the database for each car flow records.

Link the car plate information to database and save as

Recognize characters extracted by stroke analysis.

Output Database system recording the exact time and flow of vehicles in and out

Table9Overall Process of the system

In this project, the real time license plate recognition and monitoring system will be implemented based on two input videos taken at the main entrance of UTM which represents the vehicles in flow and out flow. The video will be pre-processed in advanced to extract the time frame images from the video input by rate of 5 frames per second with the assumption that the speed of the vehicles is slow enough at the entrance. The extracted image will go through various image morphology processes to remove the unwanted noise presented in the image. Next, the position of the license plate will be located by the rule-based candidate filtering algorithm. The characters presented in the license plate area will be extracted by cropping the license plate area vertically according to its width. The segmented character will then be performed stroke analysis to determine the characters presented. Finally, the license number recognized will be recorded into the database that consists of the information for the registered vehicles and the inflow and outflow records for the vehicles. A time stamp will be inserted to the database as a record of time when the vehicle detected.

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3.2

Image preprocessing stage

The video input of this system is a true colour video formed by true colour images. A true colour (RGB) image consists of three different layers of image containing same information, which are in red, green, and blue value. Thus, it require three times of memory space compared to a grayscaleimage At the same time, the . processing of the RGB image had to be performed on the three layers which cost the additional three times computations and the process will be three times slower than the process on grayscale image containing same information. To effectively speed up the license plate recognition system, grayscale image is selected throughout the plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition process. Therefore, a grayscale transformation process is needed to transform the RGB image into grayscale intensity image by eliminate hue ad saturation information in the image while remaining the luminance. In this system, the transformation is according to the formula below: 0.2989 * R + 0.5870 * G + 0.1140 * B

After the grayscale image is obtained, thresholding method is used to convert the grayscale intensity into binary black and white image using global threshold. Otsu method is used to determine the global threshold value used in the process which has the minimum intra class variance between black and white pixels. After thresholding process, the intensity value that larger than global threshold value will be set to 1 (white pixels), while the otherwise to 0 (black pixels). The white pixels will be treated as object candidates while the black pixels as background.

The binary image is the passed through different morphology process to remove the unwanted information from the image and extract the useful information. The morphology processes performed are as follows:

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clear border - remove the objects in image that connect to image border

small pixel removal - remove the connected region with very small object area

dilation - to connect character that close to each other as one object

color inversion for special plate (taxi)

Table10Sequence of morphological process performed

3.3

Plate localization

After preprocessing stage, the object of interest is cropped based on the outermost parameters of the object, and the cropped objects are stored as license plate candidate to be analysed. Plate localization using rule-based candidate filteringapproach will be performed. The candidate that does not fit the current analysis will be removed whereas those satisfy the current analysis will be stored for the next analysis. The analyses that involved are as follows:

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Dime ion and compac ness analysis atio and angle analysis Horizontal - ertical analysis Candidate verification
T l Process of rule-based candidate filtering

3.3.1 Di

and compactness analysis

The di ension of the license plate candidate refers to the height and width of the candidate area, whereas the compactness refers to the amount of white pi els coverage in between the candidate region. The compactness of the candidate region can be calculated using the formula:    

Based on theobservations upon few samples, the specifications of the height and width of license plate are defined as follows: Dimension Height (H) Width (W) Minimum number of pi els 10 5 Minimum number of pi els 80 160

Table 12Specifications of height and width of license plate

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A license plate candidate pass the dimension and compactness analysis when it satisfies one of the the following rules:
y y

10 pixels < Height < 80 pixels and 5 pixels < Width < 160 pixels Compactness > 70%

3.3.2

Ratio and angle anal sis

The ratio analysis refers to the ratio of the width over height of the plate region, and the angle analysis is perform on the angle in between the all the selected candidates. A few assumptions are made when calculating the ratio of width over height based on the empirical data obtained from the observations. The assumptions are listed as follows:
y y

For single line plate number, height < 40 pixels Plate region with height > 40 pixels is assumed to be double line plate number.

A single character inside car plate will have the width equals to of its height.

y y

The number of characters inside a plate region range from 3 to 14 characters. The plate region with number of characters less than 3 is assumed to be part of a double line plate number.

The analysis is divided into two algorithms, each for the single line plate analysis (height < 40) and double line plate analysis. For height < 40 pixels, the candidate pass the analysis when one of the rules stated below is satisfied:
y y

The number of characters in between 3 to 14 characters. The number of characters less than three and the angle between candidates are 0, (single line plate number) or (isolated double line plate)

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On the other hand, when the height of plate is more than 40 pixels, the candidate pass the analysis only when ration of width to height is greater than 0.75.

2.2.3 Horizontal-vertical anal sis

In this analysis, the candidate will first be introduced to a thinning process. The candidates that proposed only horizontal line after thinning process is assumed to be non-plate candidates and removed from the candidate list. Next, the vertical histograms of the remains candidates are generated using the formula below:

By analysing the characteristics of the vertical histogram obtained, the line image and the non-vertically connected image is removed from the candidate list.

2.2.4 Candidate verification

The validity of the license plate candidates can be verified by computing the angles of the object presented in the candidate region, which can be obtained through the following equations:

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The candidate is verified as real plate region when the angle obtained is less than 20o.

3.4

Character segmentation

After the location of the license plate is determine, character segmentation process can be done to extract the characters from license plate area. This is to provide the input of the character to the recognition algorithm as an individual character with one pixel thick.In this system, the individual character is extracted by crop the license plate region vertically based on the width of the plate region. The algorithm begins with classification of the license plate into normal plate and special plate, where special plate is defined by the cursive plate character in this process.

Next, individual character is segmented by crop the object vertically according to its width. The extracted characters will be refined to remove small portion of neighbouring object that being cut along. This is done by searching for biggest object in the region and remove all other smaller objects exist within the region. To avoid the tracing errors that could be occurred during the recognition process, the extracted characters are resized to match the size of the defined template. Last but not least, for some of the plate characters that consist of the combination of

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small and capital letters, the shifting process is required to shift the small character to the centre of the cropped region.

3.5

Character recognition b stroke anal sis

Stroke analysis is the most common method used in recognition of the oriental writing system, such as Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean. This algorithm trace the characters in a way similar to human handwriting, where the various stroke that used to combine and form the character is identified. The algorithm consists of two main processes, which are to trace character and to recognize character.

3.5.1

Trace character

Tracing a character in stroke analysis literally means to generate strokes (sequence of movements during the tracing procedure) for each character. During this process, stroke is defined as a direction structure which refers to the combination of numbers corresponding to the direction of current pixel to target pixel. The direction structure used throughout the program is as shown in figure below:

Figure 12 Direction structure

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The tracing algorithms start by finding the first pixel of the extracted characters. Generally, the first pixel is determined by through the image in left to right and top to bottom sequence. The white pixel encountered first is treated as first pixel. However, for some other characters such as A, 2, and 7, the first pixel does not follow the general rules. Therefore, first pixel refinement is needed. It is done by scanning through the image that divided into top and bottom half, and the white pixel with only one neighbour that not located right at the border is treat as first pixel. Next scanning process is performed starting from the first pixel trace to neighbour pixels and the value read is store in a chain code variable in the form as below:

Figure 13Chain code structure

The 0 indicate the end of the stroke and the coordinate refer to the starting coordinate of each corresponding stroke. This variable corresponds to all directions of the movement when tracing a character.

3.5.2

Recognize Character

Character recognition is the process to match the chain code of the input character with every single character template. The recognition algorithm start by assigning the chain code that is out of track or no match with the template to 0 for digits and - for letters. After this, the chain code is decoded in the form of stroke array where next stroke is determined whenever a 0 is encountered in the chain code variable. The first stroke is analysed first starting with the start coordinate associated. The recognition process is done by comparing the direction sequence to the available template. The process is repeated until the last stroke in the character is trace. The character and template is said to be matched only when there is no out of track pixels exist in the whole recognition process. If there is no matching, the recognition

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process will continue to next characters template until the whole temple library is scanned.

3.6

Database Creation

After recognized the license plate numbers, the result will be used to update the database system created by connecting the database created with the program. A time stamp will be applied to the record indicating the time for the record taken.

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REFERENCES

1. Samsul bin Setumin ,Plate Recognition for Malaysian Vehicles Using Stroke Analysis Technique. University Technology of Malaysia, Master Thesis, 2009 2. Wan Nur Hidayu Binti Wan. Car Plate Recognition System. University Technology of Malaysia, Degree Thesis, 2010 3. MohamadAsyrafbinCheLah. Car Plate Recognition System. University Technology of Malaysia, Degree Thesis, 2010 4. Muhammad Syafiq bin Haslan. SpecialCar Plate Recognition System (SPECARPS). University Technology of Malaysia, Degree Thesis, 2010 5. S. Setumin, U.U. Sheikh, and S.A.R Abu-Bakar .Chatacter-based Car Plate Detection and Localization, IEEE, 2010. 6. Clemens Arth, Florian Limberger, Horst Bischof. Real-Time License Plate Recognition on an Embedded DSP-Platform. IEEE, 2007 7. A.BANERJEE1, K.BASU2 and A.KONAR3. DESIGNING A REAL TIME SYSTEM FOR CAR NUMBERDETECTION USING DISCRETE HOPFIELD NETWORK, IEEE, 2006 8. E.R. Lee, P.K. Kim and H.J. Kim, Automatic Recognitionof a car license plate using color image processing,IEEE International Conference on Image Processing,Vo1.2, pp.301-305 1994.

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9. Naito, T. Tsukada, T. Yamada, K. Kozuka, K. and Yamamoto, S., "Robust recognition methods for inclined license plates under various illumination conditions outdoors", Proceedings IEEE/IEEJ/JSAI International Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems, pp. 697-702,1999 10. Bar-Hen Ron. A Real-time vehicle License Plate Recognition (LPR) System. VISL Project; 2002 11. Yu, M., and Kim, Y. D., "An approach to Korean license plate recognition based on vertical edge matching", IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, vol. 4, pp. 2975-2980, 2000. 12. BalazsEnyedi, LajosKonyha and KalmanFazekas. Real-Time Number Plate Localization Algorithms. Journal of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2006, 66-77. 13. V. Koval, V. Turchenko, V. Kochan, A. Sachenco, G Markowsky. Smart License Plate Recognition System Based on Image Processing Using Neural Network. IEEE. 2003. 14. J. Matas and K. Zimmermann. Unconstrained licence plate and text localization and recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pages 572577, Vienna, Austria, September 2005. 15. V. Shapiro, G. Gluhchev, and D. Dimov. Towards a multinational car license plate recognition system. Machine Vision and Applications, 17(3):173183, August 2006. 16. C. Rahman, W. Badawy, and A. Radmanesh. A real time vehicles license plate recognition system. In Proceedings ofthe IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS), pages 163166, 2003.