License plate detection using gradient information and cascade detectors

In this paper, we propose a license plate detection method based on the gradient information and a cascade detection framework. The proposed method consists of three main modules: image preprocessing, license plate detection and license plate confirmation. Considering the diversities of Chinese license plate, we first get the gradient images to unify plate forms through image preprocessing. The license plate will be detected roughly by using the cascade AdaBoost classifier in the next step. Finally, several heuristic judgment strategies and a voting-based method are used to verify the candidate license plates. The effectiveness of our method is validated with an experimental study in license plate detection. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.