Automatic Number Plate Recognition System for Vehicle Identification Using Optical Character Recognition

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) is an image processing technology which uses number (license) plate to identify the vehicle. The objective is to design an efficient automatic authorized vehicle identification system by using the vehicle number plate. The system is implemented on the entrance for security control of a highly restricted area like military zones or area around top government offices e.g. Parliament, Supreme Court etc. The developed system first detects the vehicle and then captures the vehicle image. Vehicle number plate region is extracted using the image segmentation in an image. Optical character recognition technique is used for the character recognition. The resulting data is then used to compare with the records on a database so as to come up with the specific information like the vehicle's owner, place of registration, address, etc. The system is implemented and simulated in Matlab, and it performance is tested on real image. It is observed from the experiment that the developed system successfully detects and recognize the vehicle number plate on real images.