Non-standard Malaysian car license plate recognition

Automated car license plate recognition systems are developed and applied for purpose of facilitating the surveillance, law enforcement, access control and intelligent transportation monitoring with least human intervention. The challenging part of this system lies in accurately recognizing a non-standard plate that consists of various character fonts, character sizes, plate size, orientations, plate and character colors, materials, positions of numeric characters and alphabetic characters. The objective of the paper is to present our developed algorithms that cope with these practical variations in the context of non-standard Malaysian plate from image scene acquisition to optical character recognition. In each standard step of license plate recognition, we consider the processing of the plates under various environmental condition and non-standard formation of characters in real scene. The algorithm is tested with 500 Malaysian car plates in real-time and the result shown that the algorithm remains relatively robust under different conditions and car plate standard.