Artificial neural networks based vehicle license plate recognition

In recent years, the necessity of personal working in traffic control is increasing because the numbers of vehicles in traffic is increasing. To deal with this problem, computer based automatic control systems are being developed. One of these systems is automatic vehicle license plate recognition system. In this work, the automatic vehicle license plate recognition system based on artificial neural networks is presented. In this system, 259 vehicle pictures were used. These vehicle pictures were taken from the CCD camera and then the license plate region dimensioned by 220x50 pixels is determined from this picture by using image processing algorithms. The characters including letters and numbers placing in the license plate were located and determined by using Canny edge detection operator and the blob coloring method. The blob coloring method was applied to the ROI for separation of the characters. In the last phase of this work, the character features were extracted by using average absolute deviation formula. The digitized characters were then classified by using feed forward back propagated multi layered perceptron neural networks. The correct classification rates were given in last section. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Guest Editor.