Proceedings of ICSP2000

Car License Plates Detection from Complex Scene

Da-shan Gao Jie Zhou

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University Beijing 100084, P.R.China Gaodsh@263.net zhoLi~ie(cc,infa.aii.tsinlrhua.edu.cii

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach

to extract car license plate from complex image without reading attempt. After an algorithm of segmentation, a series of candidate regions are obtained first. Then a confidence value based on the geometrical features of license plates is given to each candidate region and merge operation under some rules is taken. Experimental results show that the algorithm is robust in dealing with different conditions such as poor illumination and distortion of image generated by different visual angle.

1. Introduction
Automatic recognition of car license plates plays an important role in traffic surveillance systems. Such systems, which are applied in parking areas, highways, bridges and tunnels, can help a human operator and improve the overall quality of a service. Any situation requiring the automatic control of the presence and identification of a motor vehicle provided with a license number may represent a potential application. Recently, we have seen quite a few computer-visionbased systems that recognize the license plates [l-91. Most existing systems focus on the development of a reliable optical character recognizer (OCR). However prior to the recognition an OCR system performs, the license plate has to be extracted from a variable of scenes. Since there are problems such as poor ambient lighting problem, visual angle, image distortion and so on, sometimes the car license plate is difficult to be extracted. Many techniques have been reported in previous researches. Hough Transform for line detection was proposed in [3] on the assumption that the shape of

license plate is defined by lines. Combining extraction of license plates with character recognition by BP neural networks was used in [ ] [5,6] used neural 4. networks (NN) with some features in car license plate such as color and so on. Vector Quantization methodology and distributed genetic algorithm was used in [7] and [8], respectively. Although the algorithm proposed in [9] is robust for recognition of inclined license plates due to different visual angle, it depends on the high quality acquired by a special CCD and a set of strict prior knowledge. In this paper we proposed a novel method to extract car license plates from a complex scene by considering both the distributive regulation of the characters in a license plate and the geometrical features of a license plate. In our approach, we first present a segmenting algorithm, looking for the candidate regions that probably contain characters in a proper size. Then we give each candidate region a confidence value to measure its likelihood to be a license plate and combine these regions according to some rules to get a higher confidence value. Then the car license plate can be found to have highest value.

2. Car license plate detection

2 1 Outline of the algorithm ..
In this algorithm we present a technique for the location and extraction of car license plates in complex scenes. As schematized in Figure 1 the algorithm works in four major steps: preprocessing, extraction of candidate regions, morphological processing, endowing confidence value and region merge.
2.2. Preprocessing

As the image that contains car license plates are acquired in a real environment under uncontrolled

0-7803-5747-7/00/$10.00Q2000 IEEE.

illumination, it often shows thick shade and low contrast. In order to reduce the undesired effects and enhance the contrast, histogram equalization for contrast enhancement can be used when necessary. Histogram Equalization is a technique in image processing, through which we desire to take a given input image into an output image with equally many pixels at every gray level (a flat histogram) Ell]. In practice, we set a threshold observed in a set of images and equalize the image whose accumulative histogram is below this threshold. After histogram equalization a contrast enhancement is applied by a sigmoid transform function,
C

an erosion operation, is applied in order to reduce the undesired effect of noise, smooth the edges of the candidate regions and to separate the regions which should be separated. 2.5. Geometrical Criteria and Confidence Value

f ( x ) = 1+ exp(--a * ( x - d))

(1)

where c, d and a are constant which determine the maximum value, center and shape of the function.

2.3. Extraction of candidate regions

Considering the characters in a car license plate always have a distinctive gray level to the background of the license plate, which is to say that a car license plate have a relative high contrast, we can get the following features of a license plate in its gradient image. Firstly, the average gradient value of the region that contains a license plate is high because of the intense variations in it, as is mentioned in [I]. The size of the window where the local average gradient value is calculated can be set to correspond to the size of license plates in the majority of images acquired through a CCD camera. Secondly, the variance of the gradient image of a license plate region is relative low because there are a number of edges of characters in it. So the variance is calculated in a window of certain size to distinguish a license plate region from a long edge with only high contrast. Dividing the average gradient value by the local variance of gradient image at each pixel, we perform a binary method successively and get some candidate regions, which probably contain a car license.
2.4. Morphological Processing

After the image are segmented by thresholding, there may be. some noise in the image such as isolated dots, long vertical or horizontal stripes and so on. So an opening operation of morphological processing [ 113, in which a Dilation operation is performed after

To detect a license plate from a complex scene is a kind of simplified detection of a text line in an image in a sense [lo]. It is easier because of the fixed geometrical structure of license plates, which appears in almost the same shape of rectangle and contains characters with the same number. So we specify some geometrical criteria and confidence functions, the value of which is from 0 to 1, based on the internal features of a license plate to depict the likelihood between a candidate region and a license plate region. In the following, we discuss these internal features respectively. Area. The area of a region is defined as the number of its pixels. As a recognizable license plate, it must contain quite a few pixels. So the larger the area of a region is, the higher the confidence value will be. Elongation. A license plate can be regard as a horizontal rectangle with particular ratio of width and height. Even though sometimes it is distorted in a image from different visual angle, it still can be bounded by a skew rectangle with approximate ration of width and height. With this prior knowledge, we find the two axis of a region through K-L transform and make a minimum rectangle to bind the region. The elongation feature is defined as the ratio of width and height of the rectangle. The more approximate to the ratio of a real license plate region the elongation is, the higher a confident value will be given. Density. It is defined as the ratio between the region area and the area of a bounding rectangle discussed above. In general, a license plate region is fully filled. So the index permit to detect sparsely filled regions, which is given a low confidence value. Proximity to the image frame (PIF). The proximity index is defined as the distance between the pixels of the region and the image frame, normalized with respect to the corresponding image size. In many cases of application in traffic control system, a car is the focus in a image or almost is. So a license plate can .be found in relative center region of an image. This feature is introduced to identify such noisy regions that often appear along the border of the image.

Gross Confidence Value. The gross confidence value is defined as the sum of the confidence value of each feature with weighting factor, i.e. p ( r ) = x a i c = f (Area,Elongation,Density, PIF) where

c,is confidence value of feature i, aiis the

I

weighting coefficient.
2.6. Merge Rules.

J our algorithm of extracting candidate regions, a h car license plate is probably separated into several adjacent regions, which are unlike the license plate according to geometrical criteria respectively and must have low confidence values. In order to make the license region have the highest confidence value, a merge operation is performed to incorporate these separated regions together. The merge operation must conform to the rules as follows: Suppose rl and r2 are two regions and p(.) is the gross confidence value of a region. rl and r2 can be incorporated into one region, r , if the following rules is satisfied. 1) rl and r2 is close to each other, i.e. the distance between rl and r2 is bounded in a certain range; 2) max{p(rl>,p ( r 2 ) )5 p ( r ) 5 1; We applied such merging operation repeatedly until there are no regions can be merged. Then the candidate regions are sorted by the gross confidence value. The first region, which has the largest confident value, is regard as the license plate region. Figure.2 shows the images derived from each procedures of our detection algorithm.

region there is a dark shade. So in this case Histogram Equalization can be useless. The last reason is that there are some signboards with the same geometrical features with license plate. In summary, the algorithm can be applied in a certain range of the size of license plate which is according to the concrete situations. In different situations, we can adjust the size of window to coincide with it. The time spent to run the algorithm depends on the size of windows and the size of the image processed. In the experiment we applied it on the PC with CPU PIII 450 under window size 11*23, the time spent in this algorithm is less than 2 seconds at image size 300*300.
Table.1 Result of the license plate extraction algorithm applied on a car database. The size of the window in Section.2.3 is 11*23. Total Detected as 1" Detected as Missing 2"dcandidate images candidate 119 96 4 19 3.36 16.0 (%) 80.7

4. Conclusions
In this paper, a novel algorithm of extracting car license' plate in a complex image is proposed. Considering the distribution of characters in a license plate and the geometrical features of a license plate comprehensively, we apply a set of confidence values to candidate regions and combine them under some rules. The algorithm only prior knowledge of the range of license size, so it is robust to the deterioration of the image such as blur. The algorithm is also robust to detect the distorted license plate derived from different visual angles because we applied a skew rectangle generated by a K-L transform to bind the license region. The algorithm can detect different size of license to some extent and offers robustness in dealing with distorted license plate.

3. Some experimental results

We apply the above algorithm to our database of car license plates, all of which are real scene images acquired by CCD cameras. They contain cars in different conditions, such as different illumination and different visual angle. Figure.3 shows some test images in our experiment. Table. 1 shows the result of our experiment. From it we can see that, in most cases the car license plates can de detected effectively. Our algorithm Tailed in 16% cases. The failures were caused mainly by 3 reasons. First, the size of the license plate is beyond the maximum size hypothesized. Secondly, a well-proportioned illumination in the whole image but in the license

References:
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[2]. Y.Cui, Q.Huang, Extracting characters of license plates from video sequences, Machine Vision and Applications, vol. lO(5-6) 1998, p308-320 [3]. Kamat, Varsha and Ganesan, Subramaniam Efficient implementation of the Hough Transform for detecting vehicle license plates using DSPs, Proceedings of Real-Time Technology and Applications, May 15-17 1995, p58-59 [4]. T.Sirthinaphong and K.Chamnongthai, Extracting of car license plate using motor vehicle regulation and character patter recognition, Proceedings of IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems, 1998, p559562 [SI. E.R.Lee, P.K.Kim, and H.J. Kim, Automatic recognition of a car license plate using color image processing, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, NOV13-16 1994, ~301-305 [6]. S.H.Park, K.I.Kim, and K.Jung, and H.J.Kim, Locating car license plates using neural networks, Electronics Letters vo1.35( 17), 1999, p 1475-1477 [7]. Zunino, Rodolfo, Rovetta and Stefano, Visual location of license plates by vector quantization, Proceedings - IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems v 4 May 30-Jun 2 1999 1999 IEEE p IV-135-IV-138 [SI. S.K.Kim, D.W.JSim, and H.J.Kim, Recognition of vehicle license plate using a genetic algorithm based segmentation, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Sep 16-19 1996, p 661-664 [9]. T. Naito, T. Tsukada, K.Yamamd, K. Kozuka and S. Yamamoto, Proceeding of International Conference of Interlligence, Information and Systems, Aug 1999, USA. [lo]. S. Messelodi, C.M. Modena, Automatic identification and skew estimation of text lines inreal scene images, Pattern Recognition, Vo1.32 1999, ~791-810 [ll]. Kenneth R. Castleman, Digital image processing, Prentice-Hall International, Inc.

Ori g ina 1

Preprocessing Histogram Equalization Constrast Enhancement Extraction of Candi dat ed Regions

h

Filter

Value algorithm Final Result

Fig. I . The major steps of the algorithm.

Fig.2. The illustration of the algorithm: (a) The input image with poor illumination; (b) The effect of preprocessing operation; (c) The result of Sec.2.3; (d) The extracted license plate region in Sec 2.5, 2.6, which is bound by a skew rectangle: (e) The result of the algorithm. The area bound by a white rectangle is the candidate car license plate detected by the algorithm.

plate detected'by the algorithm.

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