Open road tolling in India by pattern recognition

Abstract

Modern amenities, fast data transfer and minimum delay have now become the basic requirements of all the services. This has now come in a large way in transport services also. One such service offered to transport system is toll collection. Initially toll collection was manual but now due to development in various fields it is slowly moving towards automation. The system discussed in this paper is a full automated toll collection system. Number plate recognition is used increasingly nowadays for automatic toll collection, secure parking and law enforcement. Open Road Tolling uses video evidence to identify vehicle usage of a toll facility without the use of toll booths for toll collection without having to stop or even slow down to pay the toll. The application utilizes image processing and pattern recognition methods for Open Road Tolling. This paper presents Open Road Tolling (ORT) using number plate recognition. The proposed Number Plate Recognition (NPR) techniques consist of two modules: histogram based number plate localization and number plate recognition using template matching. This approach has an advantage of being simple & faster. This has come up in a large way in foreign countries, but not in India to that extent here it is still at the level of idea.