Research and implementation of license plate location based on histogram division method

The license plate location is an essential process in the license plate recognition system, and the location algorithm affects the result of recognition directly. In view of vehicles image on different background and light densities, this paper presents a license plate location algorithm, which based on histogram division. At first, this method makes pretreatment on license plate image. The pretreatment mainly includes graying the image, detecting the edge on image using the Prewitt operator, removing some spots that influence location by the median filtering algorithm and taking binaryzation on image. Then, according to the characteristics of the abundant textures on the license plate, the histogram division for the image after pretreatment is adopted to finally locate the license plate region. A large number of experiments have proved that this algorithm has high accuracy rate, location speed and the good practical value.