An Improved Method to Recognize the Iraqi License Plates Using Local Projections

Abstract

The License Plate (LP), is a rectangular metal plate that contains numbers and letters. This plate is fixed onto the vehicle's body. It is used as a mean to identify the vehicle. The License Plate Recognition (LPR) system is a mean where a vehicle can be identified automatically using a computer system. The LPR has many applications, such as security applications for car tracking, or enforcing control on vehicles entering restricted areas (such as airports or governmental buildings). This paper is concerned with introducing a new method to recognize the Iraqi LPs using local vertical and horizontal projections, then testing its performance. The attained success rate reached 99.16%, with average recognition time around 0.012 second for recognizing a single alphanumeric symbol .