Identifying Vehicle Number plates using Matlab

This project is used to identfy the authorized and unauthorized vechicle using number plate. The number can be extracted using the character segmentation.

Basically video surveillance system is used for security purpose as well as monitoring systems. But Detection of moving object is a challenging part of video surveillance. Video surveillance system is used for Home security, Military applications, Banking /ATM security, Traffic monitoring etc.

Step 1: Preprocessing the Image

The first step in identifying a vehicle number plate is to preprocess the image of the vehicle. This involves removing any noise, enhancing the contrast, and converting the image to grayscale. These steps help to improve the accuracy of the number plate recognition algorithm.

In Matlab, we can use the 'imread' function to read the image and the 'imnoise' function to remove any noise from the image. We can use the 'imadjust' function to enhance the contrast of the image, and the 'rgb2gray' function to convert the image to grayscale.

Step 2: Detecting the Number Plate

The next step is to detect the location of the number plate in the image. This can be done using edge detection algorithms such as the Canny edge detection algorithm. The edges of the number plate are detected, and then the Hough transform is used to identify the straight lines in the image.

In Matlab, we can use the 'edge' function to perform edge detection, and the 'hough' function to perform the Hough transform. The Hough transform will give us a set of lines in the image, which we can then filter to identify the lines that correspond to the edges of the number plate.

Step 3: Extracting the Number Plate

Once the location of the number plate has been identified, we can extract the number plate from the image. This can be done using image cropping techniques. We can use the coordinates of the corners of the number plate to crop the image and extract the number plate.

In Matlab, we can use the 'imcrop' function to crop the image and extract the number plate.

Step 4: Recognizing the Characters

The final step is to recognize the characters on the number plate. This can be done using optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms. We can use the 'ocr' function in Matlab to recognize the characters on the number plate.

In order to improve the accuracy of the OCR algorithm, we can preprocess the image of the number plate by removing any noise and enhancing the contrast.