Abstract
We propose a method for segmentation of a line of characters in a noisy low resolution image of a car license plate. The Hidden Markov Chains are used to model a stochastic relation between an input image and a corresponding character segmentation. The segmentation problem is expressed as the maximum a posteriori estimation from a set of admissible segmentations. The proposed method exploits a specific prior knowledge available for the application at hand. Namely, the number of characters is known and its is also known that the characters can be segmented to sectors with equal but unknown width. The efficient algorithm for estimation based on dynamic programming is derived. The proposed method was successfully tested on data from a real life license plate recognition system.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Duda, R.O., Hart, P.E., Stork, D.G.: Pattern classification, 2nd edn. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2001)
Lu, Y.: Machine printed characters segmentation - an overview. Pattern Recognition 28(1), 67–80 (1995)
Martin, F., Borges, D.: Automatic car plate recognition using a partial segmentation algorithm. In: IASTED conference on Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Applications, SPPRA (2003)
Schlesinger, M.I., Hlaváč, V.: Ten lectures on statistical and structural pattern recognition. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2002)
Shapiro, V., Gluhchev, G.: Multinational license plate recognition system: Segmentation and classification. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, vol. 4, pp. 352–355 (2004)
Viterbi, A.J.: Error bounds for convolutional codes and an asymptotically optimal decoding algorithm. IEEE Transations Information Theory 13, 260–269 (1967)
Zhang, Y., Zhang, C.: A new character segmentation algorithm for license plate. In: IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2003), Columbus, USA (June 2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Franc, V., Hlaváč, V. (2005). License Plate Character Segmentation Using Hidden Markov Chains. In: Kropatsch, W.G., Sablatnig, R., Hanbury, A. (eds) Pattern Recognition. DAGM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3663. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550518_48
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550518_48
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28703-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31942-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)