Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Number Plate region extraction

After a long break I started writing about my image processing studies.This time KD came with a project to extract number plate region from an image. The advantage of my method over other methods are the following.
1. fast processing
2. It can give you multiple regions in image if more than one number plate present
3. It can handle image rotation up to a certain degree( +- 35 ) .I used Eigen vectors.
4. No third party libraries like openCV or aforge ( yes some times i like to reinvent the wheels again )


See the video to see the project in action.



Although the number plate extraction parts works pretty good , I don't have a good OCR module. So i am having troubles to extract numbers from image. I tried using a simple back propagation neural network, its quality of recognition is not that great.Now i am trying to develop a rotation,scale invariant  recognizer. It may take another 9 or eight months to do that. But if it works i think that would be a great achievement. I will try to post more updates here.. 


If you know any good optical character recognition library, please let me know.