OverviewThere has been a number of commercialized software that can be used for identification of license plates, which are mainly from the USA and Europe. However, they cannot be utilize in Malaysia since Malaysian license plates are differ in styles and formats. The license plate of vehicle s in Malaysia are divided into several different colours and formats. For example, the license plate for normal private vehicle has black background and white characters as shown in Figure1.Whereas he license plate for taxis has white background and black characters. Another type of license plates, which are occasionally introduced, are special plates such as Proton Satria, Sukom, Tiara and several others. These plates produced usually during the introduction of such vehicles in the market.
To overcome the problem of this complexity, CAIRO has developed a software known as VISIONPLATE which can recognize various license plates design especially in Malaysia. The second version of this system is currently being designed to overcome other problems as well such as various levels of illumination and blurriness, which are not incorporated in the first version.
Product FeaturesVisionPlate is a state-of-the-art, image recognition software package for the automatic visual detection, identification and recognition of vehicle license plates.
It is capable of detecting, locating and identifying the plate number of any vehicle.
The CCD camera takes images of incoming car when the loop sensors activated.
The images are transmitted towards the computer, typically via standard video signal(PAL/NTSC).
The video signal of the camera is received and digitized by a video capture device (a frame grabber card) which has been installed in the computer.
In the computer, the image recognition module of VisionPlate will process the digitized images. The steps of the recognition process are:
- The number plate is located on the images
- The located number plate is extracted from the image, and transformed to a uniform size position.
- Using segmentation, the characters of the plate are identified.
- The identified characters are recognized using Neural Network(NN) technology
The result of the recognition is the number plate in text(ASCII) format. It then can be processed further according to the specific application such as stored or looked-up in the database.
This output can also be linked to ticket printing machine, payroll system and etc. via serial port(RS232).
Application- Vehicle Access Control
- Vehicle Entrance Admission
- Road Traffic Surveillance/ Control
- Vehicle Theft Prevention / Detection
- Crime Prevention/ Detection
- Vehicle Counting Automation
- Highway Toll Collection
- Public/ Private Car Park Management/ Automation /Control
Benefits- Reduced costs by automation
- Efficiency of work-processes
- Spare of time and resources
- Improved service
- Reduced human mistakes
- Efficient protection of assets
The research outputs from CAIRO are improved further and commercialized through this company. In line with the re-structuring policy of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, CAIRO has since expanded to include more research groups such as control, instrumentation and process tomography. CAIRO is now under a research alliance called ACE (Automation, Cybernetics, and Engineering Systems), a move by UTM in the restructuring process in order to encourage a more multidisciplinary research rather than a faculty-based.
