Car Plate Character Extraction and Recognition Using Stroke Analysis

In this paper we address the issue of recognizing nonstandard Malaysian car license plates. These plates contain nonstandard characters such as italic, cursive and connected letters, which most plate recognition systems are unable to recognize. We propose a technique using stroke extraction and analysis to recognize these nonstandard characters. The proposed technique first extracts the contour of the character and then the stroke direction which are used for classification. The advantage of this method is that the system requires no training. From the experiments performed, the method has a correct recognition accuracy of 95% and even works with standard car plates.