Prelude

Purpose

To develop an algorithm for extraction of license plate numbers from still photos of stationary cars.

Methods

We divided this project into two sections- Image Processing and Support Vector Machine (SVM) Training:

• We take picture of a still car (from either front or back), compress and crop out to speed up the process, localize the plate position and extract the letters into individual binary matrices.
• We take each of the matrix generated in the previous process and use the SVM algorithm to distinguish which letter exactly it is.

Applications

This algorithm can be integrated to the related vehicle identification applications such as:

1. Parking lot registration
2. Traffic violation tracking
3. Vehicle surveillance