Edge assisted fast binarization scheme for improved vehicle license plate recognition

Identity of a motor vehicle is usually through its license plate. Automatic vehicle license plate recognition has several applications in intelligent traffic management systems. In this paper, we propose and describe a fast edge assisted adaptive binarization technique for improved extraction of text from license plate images captured using mobile phone camera. We evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed binarization scheme with some well known algorithms on real vehicle images. Experiments on 400 real vehicle images captured using mobile phones shows that the edge based scheme is not only fast but also performs as well as the other binarization technique.