Character extraction of license plates from video

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach to extract characters on a license plate of a moving vehicle given a sequence of perspective distortion corrected license plate images. We model the extraction of characters as a Markov random field (MRF). With the MRF modeling, the extraction of characters is formulated as the problem of maximizing the a posteriori probability based on given prior and observations. A genetic algorithm with local greedy mutation operator is employed to optimize the objective function. Experiments and comparison study were conducted. It is shown that our approach provides better performance than other single frame methods.