Abstract:
Real time
“Character Recognition & Pattern Recognition” is a latest research topic.
Research Engineers all around the world are working on it. This technique is
being used in many daily life applications to make human life much easy.
Vehicle Number Recognition (VNR) is an image processing technology which uses
efficient algorithms to detect the vehicle number from real time images. A toll
road is a privately or publicly built road for which one pays a toll tax for
its use. The building or facility in which a toll is collected may be called a
toll plaza, toll station, or toll gate. The purpose of the research project
(Smart Toll Tax Collection System Using Automatic Vehicle Number Recognition)
is to automate the toll collection and to facilitate the toll collecting
authorities. The system first detects the vehicle and then captures the image
of the front view of the vehicle. Vehicle number plate is localized &
characters are segmented. The system is designed for grayscale images so it
detects the number plate regardless of its color. Template matching technique
is used for the character recognition. The resulting vehicle number is then
compared with the available database of all the vehicles so as to come up with
information about the vehicle type & to charge toll tax accordingly. The
system is then allowed to open road barrier for the vehicle & generate toll
tax receipt. The vehicle information (such as passing time, date, toll amount)
is also stored in the different database to maintain the record.
Algorithm for Automatic Vehicle Number Recognition is
designed in MATLAB. The road barriers & traffic is controlled by using
Microcontroller. System also contains LCD display to guide vehicles. Apart from
toll collection system can also be used for security and authorized vehicles
entrance in organizations & for automatic commercial parking systems. The
proposed AVNR algorithm consists of some stages. In the first stage, Vertical
edges of the acquired image are found. In the next stage, histogram analysis of
its bit density is used for finding the possible candidate regions of license
plate. Then in 3rd step deviation in rows is applied to locate exact candidate
region. In the next stage, exact location of Number Plate is extracted by using
some Morphological operators. Then in next step image region properties are
found and by using bounding box Number Plate is segmented and each character is
separated. In the last step each segmented image is compared with characters
& digits templates which are already stored on computer & on the basis
of its result Vehicle Number is found in String format. The system is
implemented on hardware with the integration of Matlab, and its performance is
tested on real images & a working prototype is developed. It is observed
from the experiments that the developed system successfully detects and
recognizes the vehicle number plate on real images of Pakistani vehicles.
Block diagram:
Components used:
·
Microcontroller
·
Web camera
·
Servo motor
·
Vehicle
·
Laptop
Conclusion:
The system is implemented for the
automatic toll collection, beside this AVNR method developed in this research
project can be also used for various other important applications such as,
smart parking systems, access control, border control, finding stolen cars,
airport parking & can also be used as a marketing tool. The design also
deals with the issues of Number Plate Locating & Plate segmentation to make
an efficient system. This research project facilitates the users in numerous
ways like fair toll tax payment, automatic & easy way of paying toll tax.
