In recent years, the performance and accuracy of automatic license plate number recognition (ALPR) systems have greatly improved, however the increasing number of applications for such systems have made ALPR research more challenging than ever. The inherent computational complexity of search dependent algorithms remains a major problem for current ALPR systems. This paper proposes a novel search-free method of localization based on the estimation of saliency and local variance. Gabor functions are then used to validate the choice of candidate license plate. The algorithm was applied to three image datasets with different levels of complexity and the results compared with a number of benchmark methods, particularly in terms of speed. The proposed method outperforms the state of the art methods and can be used for real time applications.
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