An Intelligent and Real Time System for Automatic Driven Toll Gate System under Complex Scenes

摘要

Intelligent transport systems play an important role in supporting smart cities because of their promising applications in various areas, such as electronic toll collection, highway surveillance, urban logistics and traffic management. One of the key components of intelligent transport systems is vehicle license plate recognition, which enables the identification of each vehicle by recognizing the characters on its license plate through various image processing and computer vision. With almost 15 Crore vehicles using national highways across India, a 10-minute idling per vehicle at toll booths result in huge traffic every day. The reason why vehicle stand at toll gates are due to the need of exact change for an absurd amount of Rs. 27/- or Rs. 54/- etc, malfunctioning of the system, changeover of staff, taking two minutes to log off and log in as per the attendant and balancing cash, drivers chatting with attendants too and manual collection of tolls. Thus we like to proceed with the idea of automated toll gate with no manual power. This paper presents a robust and efficient method for license plate detection with the purpose of accurately localizing vehicle license plates from complex scenes in real time. A simple yet effective image downscaling method is first proposed to substantially accelerate license plate localization without sacrificing detection performance compared with that achieved using the original image. Currently world is trending with Internet, so with the help of that the toll amount is deducted from the owner's bank account and a SMS notification is sent to their phone. The detection ratio from 91.09% to 96.62% while decreasing the run time from 672 ms to 42 ms for processing an image with a resolution of 1082 × 728. The executable code and our collected dataset are publicly available.