Abstract: Design of an algorithm for vehicle identification by recognizing the number plate is presented. Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) has many applications in traffic systems (highway electronic toll collection, red light violation enforcement, border and customs checkpoints, etc.).The proposed algorithm consists of three major parts: Number plate recognition, vehicle size detection and recognition of plate characters. For extracting the plate region, edge detection algorithms and smearing algorithms are used. In segmentation part, smearing algorithms, filtering and some morphological algorithms are used. And finally genetic algorithm is used for recognition of plate characters. For vehicle size detection blob detection method is used and for theft detection number plates are matched. Experiments have been conducted with images taken from various scenes and conditions and the detection rate is found to be 92.5 %. Experiments have conducted for recognition with LPR images taken at different conditions and the recognition rate is found to be 91 %. Detection time is linear function of number of objects in the input image. Potential applications include provisioning of vehicle parking facilities and campus security system for permitting authorized vehicles into the premises.

Keywords: Number Plate Recognition, Genetic algorithm, plate region extraction, segmentation, thinning, vertical and horizontal projection.