Abstract
Despite the successes of license plate detection (LPD) methods in the past decades, only a few methods can effectively detect multi-style license plates (LPs), especially those from different countries. This paper addresses the challenge of LPD by using an automatic graph-cut-based segmentation approach to effectively detect LPs of varying sizes, colors, backgrounds, distances, and orientations. To evaluate our proposed approach, a developed algorithm was tested on 1050 vehicle images. An accuracy and average processing time of 98.67% and 0.1 s were achieved for the detection of LPs, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect LPs from both the front and back view of vehicles and also vehicles with skew orientation. Toward the end, a comparison of results with existing methods is also reported.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
K.T. Thomas, J. Vaijayanthi, A review of automatic license plate detection using edge detection methods. Int. J. Res. Appl. Sci. Eng. Technol. 2(V), 18–22 (2014)
A.M. Al-Ghaili, S. Mashohor, A. Ramli, A. Ismail, Vertical-edge-based car license-plate detection method. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 62(1), 26–38 (2013)
A. Roy, D.P. Ghoshal, Number plate recognition for use in different countries using an improved segmentation. IEEE 1–3 (2011)
A.O. Salau, Development of a vehicle plate number localization technique using computer vision. Ph.D. Dissertation. Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, p. 200 (2018)
A.O. Salau, T.K. Yesufu, B.S. Ogundare, Vehicle plate number localization using a modified grabcut algorithm. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2019.01.011
Z. Fu, L. Wang, Color image segmentation using gaussian mixture model and em algorithm. Springer 346, 61–66 (2012)
F. Yi, I. Moon, Image segmentation: a survey of graph-cut methods, in IEEE International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI) (2012), pp. 1936–1941
B. Basavaprasad, R.S. Hegadi, Improved grabcut technique for segmentation of color image. Int. J. Comput. Appl. (2014) 5–8
W.S. Chowdhury, A.R. Khan, J. Uddin, Vehicle license plate detection using image segmentation and morphological image processing, in International Symposium on Signal Processing and Intelligent Recognition Systems (2018), pp. 142–154. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67934-1_13
V. Franc, V. Hlaváč, License plate character segmentation using hidden markov chains, in Joint Pattern Recognition Symposium (2005), pp. 385–392. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550518_48
D. Khattab, H.M. Ebeid, F.M. Tolba, A.S. Hussein, Clustering-based image segmentation using automatic grabcut, in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Informatics and Systems (2016), pp. 95–100
C. Hung, Y. Chen, Y. Chang, S. Ruan, An efficient thresholding algorithm for license plate recognition based on intelligent block detection, in 4th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, Xi’an (2009), pp. 236–240. https://doi.org/10.1109/iciea.2009.5138203
T. Panchal, H. Patel, A. Panchal, License plate detection using harris corner and character segmentation by integrated approach from an image. Proc. Comput. Sci. 79, 419–425 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2016.03.054
H. Hendry, C. Chen, Automatic license plate recognition via sliding-window darknet-YOLO deep learning. Image Vis. Comput. 87, 47–56 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imavis.2019.04.007
A.C. Roy, M.K. Hossen, D. Nag, License plate detection and character recognition system for commercial vehicles based on morphological approach and template matching, in 3rd IEEE International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information Communication Technology (ICEEICT), Dhaka. (2016), pp. 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ceeict.2016.7873098
H.V. Dastjerdi, V. Rostami, F. Kheiri, Automatic license plate detection system based on the point weighting and template matching, in 7th IEEE Conference on Information and Knowledge Technology (IKT), Iran (2015), pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/ikt.2015.7288783
C. Hsieh, Y. Juan, K. Hung, Multiple license plate detection for complex background, in 19th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA’05), Taipei, Taiwan (2005), pp. 389–392. https://doi.org/10.1109/aina.2005.257
E.N. Mortensen, W.A. Barrett, Intelligent scissors for image composition, in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (1995), pp. 191–198
Y. Boykov, M.P. Jolly, Interactive graph-cuts for optimal boundary and region segmentation of objects in N-D images, in International Conference on Computer Vision. I (2001), pp. 105–112
C. Rother, V. Kolmogorov, A. Blake, GrabCut interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph-cuts. ACM Trans. Graph. 309–314 (2004)
D. Freedman, T. Zhang, Interactive graph cut based segmentation with shape priors, in Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’05) (2005), p. 8
F. Wang, S. Ferraro, L. Lin, T.S. Mayor, V. Molinaro, M. Ribeiro, Localised boundary air layer and clothing evaporative resistances for individual body segments. J. Egronomics 55(7), 799–812 (2012). Taylor and Francis
Z. Yu, M. Xu, Z. Gao, Biomedical image segmentation via constrained graph-cuts and pre-segmentation, in IEEE International Conference on EMBC (2011), pp. 5714–5717
Online CV Database: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/Imagedbase.html, www.cvpapers.com/datasets.html, www.medialab.ntua.gr/research/LPRdatabase.html
A.O. Salau, S. Jain, Feature extraction: a survey of the types, techniques and applications, in 5th IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICSC-2019), Noida, India
Y. Boykov, O. Veksler, Graphcuts in vision and graphics: theories and applications, in Handbook of mathematical models in computer vision (2005), pp. 100–118
S. Yang, J. Jiang, M. Wu, C.C. Ho, Real-time license plate detection system with 2-level 2D Haar Wavelet transform and Wiener-deconvolution vertical edge enhancement, in 9th IEEE International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing, Tainan (2013), pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1109/icics.2013.6782805
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Salau, A.O. (2020). An Effective Graph-Cut Segmentation Approach for License Plate Detection. In: Jain, S., Paul, S. (eds) Recent Trends in Image and Signal Processing in Computer Vision. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1124. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2740-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2740-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-2739-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-2740-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)