Bangladeshi Vehicle Digital License Plate Recognition for Metropolitan Cities Using Support Vector Machine

Bangladeshi vehicle digital license plate recognition system using support vector machine for metropolitan cities (i.e. Dhaka, Chittagong) is presented in this paper. The proposed system divided into three major partslicense plate detection, plate character segmentation and character recognition. Experiments have been done for this proposed framework. More than 1000 images taken from various scenes are used, including diverse angles, different lightening conditions and complex scenes. In the first phase, Sobel operator and histogram analysis is used to detect the license plate region. Then, connected component labeling and bounding box technique used to segment the characters of detected license plate region. After that, Gabor filter is applied on the segmented characters to acquire desired character features. Since feature vector obtained using Gabor filter is in a high dimension, to reduce the dimensionality a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that is Kernel PCA has been used. Finally, Support Vector Machine has been used for classification. The experimental results show that proposed method can correctly recognize the license plate characters. Keywords-vehicle digital license plate detection; morphology; Sobel operator; connected component labeling; Gabor filter; Kernel PCA; Support Vector Machine.