Building a license plate recognition system for Vietnam tollbooth

The Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system has wide application and very important in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) such as the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. The purpose of this paper is designing an Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system, which will be applied for one-stop and non-stop ETC in Vietnam. Our ALPR system consists of two major parts: the first part is hardware system and the second part is software system. In the first part, the price, types of equipments and technology will be considered for designing, which satisfied for Vietnam environment, Vietnam regulation in the road pricing rules and Vietnam standard of ETC. In the second part, we will combined image processing technology and artificial neural network to proposed a improved software system, our software include four modules: image capture, license plate location, characters segmentation and characters recognition. Our ALPR software will be tested by 700 Vietnam vehicle images, which obtained from actual system and complex background: lightening conditions (night & day), license angles, illumination, size and type, colors and reflected light. Our ALPR software is more effective than some of the existing methods earlier, the efficiency of computing time & accuracy is improved and very satisfied for all types of Vietnam LP and Vietnam environment.