A vehicle license plate recognition system which can be applied to various ITS application systems has been developed. This paper reports on the character recognition, the most important technology in vehicle license plate recognition. In the vehicle license plate character recognition, it is necessary to recognize the low-quality characters such as those half hidden, partially erased, linked or deformed. The character recognition method consists of the character string extraction using its geometric characteristics, segmentation of character by using dynamic programming, and character recognition using its outline characteristics and statistic method. By integrating this character recognition method onto the vehicle license plate recognition system, success of 99% or higher has been achieved in domestic operation of character recognition, and 97% or higher in foreign tests.
Samenvatting