Use of Mathematical Morphology in Vehicle Plate Detection

In the past couple of decades, the number of vehicles has increased radically. A statistic which presents the number of cars sold worldwide from 1990 through 2017, forecasts for 2018, some 81.6 million automobiles are expected to be sold by the end 2018. With this continuous increase, it is becoming very tedious to keep track of each vehicle for the purpose of security, law enforcement and traffic management. This phenomenon of rapidly increasing vehicles on the road highlights the importance for a vehicle number plate recognition system. By recognizing the car plates, the drivers of the vehicle can be identified from the database. Number plate detection system are used in various applications like traffic law maintenance, traffic control, automatic toll collection, parking systems, automatic gate openers. This paper presents a unique algorithmic procedure for detecting vehicle plate number which is based on the concept of mathematical morphology. The developed algorithm is simple, efficient and flexible. The algorithm is capable of working satisfactorily even in different constraints such as like rain, smoke and shadow. This user-friendly software tool is developed on MATLAB platform which is one of the common and efficient image processing analysis tools.