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iLPR: an Indian license plate recognition system

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Abstract

One of the major concerns of Integrated Traffic Management System (ITMS) in India is the identification of vehicles violating the stop-line at a road crossing. A large number of Indian vehicles do not stop at the designated stop-line and pose serious threat to the pedestrians crossing the roads. The current work reports the technicalities of the \( i \)LPR (Indian License Plate Recognition) system implemented at five busy road-junctions in one populous metro city in India. The designed system is capable of localizing single line and two-line license plates of various sizes and shapes, recognizing characters of standard/ non-standard fonts and performing seamlessly in varying weather conditions. The performance of the system is evaluated with a large database of images for different environmental conditions. We have published a limited database of Indian vehicle images in http://code.google.com/p/cmaterdb/ for non-commercial use by fellow researchers. Despite unparallel complexity in the Indian city-traffic scenario, we have achieved around 92 % plate localization accuracy and 92.75 % plate level recognition accuracy over the localized vehicle images.

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Acknowledgement

Authors are thankful to the CMATER and the SRUVM project of C.S.E. Department, Jadavpur University, for providing necessary infrastructural facilities during the progress of the work. We acknowledge the collaborations with emotions Infomedia Pvt. Ltd., India and Department of Traffic, Kolkata Police, West Bengal, India for collection of the image database and design of the iLPR system. Dr. Saha, is thankful to the authorities of MCKV Institute of Engineering for kindly permitting him to carry on the research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECE Department, MCKV Institute of Engineering, 243, G. T. Road (N), Liluah, Howrah, 711204, India

    Satadal Saha

  2. CSE Department, Jadavpur University, Jadavpur, Kolkata, India

    Subhadip Basu & Mita Nasipuri

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  1. Satadal Saha
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  2. Subhadip Basu
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  3. Mita Nasipuri
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Correspondence to Satadal Saha.

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Saha, S., Basu, S. & Nasipuri, M. iLPR: an Indian license plate recognition system. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 10621–10656 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2196-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2196-7

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