Mobile Phone Based Vehicle License Plate Recognition for Road Policing

Identity of a vehicle is done through the vehicle license plate by traffic police in general. Automatic vehicle license plate recognition has several applications in intelligent traffic management systems. The security situation across the globe and particularly in India demands a need to equip the traffic police with a system that enables them to get instant details of a vehicle. The system should be easy to use, should be mobile, and work 24×7. In this paper, we describe a mobile phone based, client-server architected, license plate recognition system. While we use the state of the art image processing and pattern recognition algorithms tuned for Indian conditions to automatically recognize non-uniform license plates, the main contribution is in creating an end to end usable solution. The client application runs on a mobile device and a server application, with access to vehicle information database, is hosted centrally. The solution enables capture of license plate image captured by the phone camera and passes to the server; on the server the license plate number is recognized; the data associated with the number plate is then sent back to the mobile device, instantaneously. We describe the end to end system architecture in detail. A working prototype of the proposed system has been implemented in the lab environment.