Vehicle parking inventory system utilizing image recognition through artificial neural networks

An automated vehicle logging system is introduced in this paper. The system utilizes character recognition through images captured from the entrance of a parking area. These images are processed to extract the licensed plates of any vehicle entering the parking area. Extracted plates images are then converted into numerical forms devised by researchers to fit the requirements of the artificial neural network. From the numbered plate, each character is then extracted to produce their distinct features. Character recognition engine is primarily implemented using feed forward neural networks. There are 50 input neurons which are defined by resizing each character into 25×25 pixel image and summing all the pixel values in each row and each columns resulting to 50 sums. After which a numerical value will be produce and will signify a character equivalent. Characters are recognized separately. This process is done until all of the characters are recognized. Afterwards, these characters are then concatenated to produce the plate number identity. The system is trained using 5860 sets of training data yielding a system with 0.0001645724% error.