I?m interested in knowing the different techniques and coding tools
that have been used in the license plate recognition systems.

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Request for Question Clarification by websearcher-ga on 21 Mar 2005 08:54 PST

Hello ddcohen:

This question has come up before on Google Answers:

OCR for License Plates 
URL: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=452412

Please review that answer and, if you want more information, let us
know more precisely what you need in a clarification.

Thanks.

websearcher

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Clarification of Question by ddcohen-ga on 22 Mar 2005 00:16 PST

websearcher-ga, thanks for replying?I checked the question, it mostly
covered the use of OCR in LPR + some of the links aren't working!! the
OCR is an important issue but I need further information on some of
the coding tools that may help with the following:
1-car or plate image pre processing
2-plate localization
3-character segmentation
4-classification

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Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 22 Mar 2005 21:10 PST

Hello Ddcohen,

You mention many of the steps listed at
  http://visl.technion.ac.il/projects/2003w24/
which was the first link referred to in the other OCR / LPR question.

Are you looking for code to imlement an LPR system or references to
suppliers of those kinds of systems (or components to implement such a
system)?

  --Maniac

PS: Note that the links are valid as of the creation of the answer. It
appears that itctraffic.com has reorganized their site and perhaps has
removed the content. If you are interested in that specific site - I
suggest an email to the webmaster to see if the information is still
available in some other form.

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Clarification of Question by ddcohen-ga on 24 Mar 2005 00:47 PST

Hi!
Actaully what I'm looking for are both some codes and some components
to implement such systems.

There isn't any magic to license plate recognition.

You need to:

1. Capture a shot of the front or rear of the vehicle at an appropriate angle.
2. Run OCR software on the image
3. Extract the text

You can test something like this using a webcam, graphic libraries
like ImageMagick and off the shelf OCR software. If you actually want
data about the plates for classification or other purposes, you'll
need to subscribe to a service that lets you access DMV records. ($$$)

If you are seriously planning on implementing a traffic camera system,
depending on your budget you can get out of the box solutions, just a
heavy-duty outdoor camera or a camera and OCR package.

bduffy, you have metioned the ImageMagick graphic librabry! can you
provide more informatoin about this library and what is the use of it?
an does it contain any OCR operations?

I don't think imagemagic does OCR but it is a graphics libary.

Try google for OCR projects.