License plate recognition (LPR) is one of the most important applications of applying computer techniques towards intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In order to recognize a license plate efficiently, location and extraction of the license plate is the key step. Hence finding the position of a license plate in a vehicle image is considered to be the most crucial step of an LPR system, and this in turn greatly affects the recognition rate and overall speed of the whole system. This paper mainly deals with the detecting license plate location issues in Indian traffic conditions. The vehicles in India sometimes bare extra textual regions such as owner’s name, symbols, popular sayings and advertisement boards in addition to license plate. Situation insists for accurate discrimination of text class and fine aspect ratio analysis. In addition to this additional care taken up in this paper is to extract license plate of motorcycle (size of plate is small and double row plate), car (single as well as double row type), transport system such as bus, truck, (dirty plates) as well as multiple license plates present in an image frame under consideration. Disparity of aspect ratios is a typical feature of Indian traffic. Proposed method aims at identifying region of interest by performing a sequence of directional segmentation and morphological processing. Always the first step is of contrast enhancement, which is accomplished by using sigmoid function. In the subsequent steps, connected component analysis followed by different filtering techniques like aspect ratio analysis and plate compatible filter technique is used to find exact license plate. The proposed method is tested on large database consisting of 750 images taken in different conditions. The algorithm could detect the license plate in 742 images with success rate of 99.2%.
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