A configurable method for multi-style license plate recognition

Despite the success of license plate recognition (LPR) methods in the past decades, few of them can process multi-style license plates (LPs), especially LPs from different nations, effectively. In this paper, we propose a new method for multi-style LP recognition by representing the styles with quantitative parameters, i.e., plate rotation angle, plate line number, character type and format. in the recognition procedure these four parameters are managed by relevant algorithms, i.e., plate rotation, plate line segmentation, character recognition and format matching algorithm, respectively. To recognize special style LPs, users can configure the method by defining corresponding parameter values, which will be processed by the relevant algorithms. In addition, the probabilities of the occurrence of every LP style are calculated based on the previous LPR results, which will result in a faster and more precise recognition. Various LP images were used to test the proposed method and the results proved its effectiveness. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.