Blob detection and filtering for character segmentation of license plates

Abstract

This paper presents a character segmentation method to address automatic number plate recognition problem. The method considered pixel intensity, character appearance, and arrangement of characters altogether to segment character regions. The method firstly discovers candidate blobs of characters by using connected component analysis and appearance-based character detection. A character recognizer is used for removing redundant and noisy blobs. Then, a trained classifier selects character blobs among the candidates by examining arrangement of the blobs. Experimental results show an achievement of 98.3% of segmentation rate, which prove the effectiveness of our method.