Image Acquisition and Recognition of License Plates of Passing Vehicles under Varied Illummination Condition

Abstract

In this paper a novel system for license plate recognition is presented. To acquire fine images of fast passing vehicles under the illumination condition varied greatly, a sensing aparatus, which is composed of lens, a prism beam splitter, two CCD cameras and a shutter control board, with wide dynamic range has been developed. This aparatus can be applied to fast passing vehicles over a speed of 100km/h in scenes with a 1.5×10⁴ dynamic range. The performance of the developed system has been investigated on passing vehicles under the illumination condition including from the twilight to the sunlight at noon. Obtaining recognition rate 98%, thus the developed system is effective for license plates recognition.