Design and implementation of vehicles identification and tracking system

Abstract

Iraq is one of the countries that face real security challenges. As a precautionary step, the governmental authorities have installed cameras and computers at checkpoints to facilitate monitoring of vehicles. However, such solutions are inefficient because they run manually and suffer from a lack of automation. One of the main segments of intelligent transport systems is vehicle license plate recognition, which enables the identification of each vehicle by recognizing the characters on its license plate through various image processing and computer vision techniques. In this research, a system for automatic vehicles identification and tracking is proposed. The proposed system consists of a number of distributed plate recognition subsystems that supported with cameras. These subsystems are connected to a central database to store and manage vehicles information for further processing. The proposed system is tracking all vehicles that pass through checkpoints and map them on an interactive map. The system is designed and tested in a real environment and at different times of the day. Experiments show that the system can capture the vehicle's image and recognize the license plate effectively within 2 to 4 seconds.