MobLP: A CC-based approach to vehicle license plate number segmentation from images acquired with a mobile phone camera

Several License Plate Recognition systems have been developed in the past. Our objective is to design a system implemented on a standard camera-equipped mobile phone, capable of recognising vehicle license number. As a first step towards it we propose a license plate text segmentation approach that is robust to various lighting conditions, complex background owing to dirty or rusted LP and non-convential fonts. In the Indian scenario, some vehicle owners choose to write their vehicle number plates in regional languages. Since our method does not rely on language-specific features, it is therefore capable of segmenting license number written in different languages. Using color connected component labeling, stroke width and text heuristics we perform the task of accurately segmenting the number from the license plate. Experiments carried out on Indian vehicle license plate (LP) images acquired using a camera-equipped cellphone shows that our system peforms well on different LP images some with different types of degradations. OCR evaluation on the extracted LP number text with the proposed method has an accuracy of 98.86%.