Accurate license plate recognition system for different styles of Iraqi license plates

Abstract

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) used for many applications especially in security applications, including border control. However, more accurate and language-independent techniques are still needed. This work provides a new approach to identifying Arabic license plates in different formats, colors, and even including English characters. Numbers, characters, and layouts with either 1-line or 2-line layouts are presented. For the test, we intend to use Iraqi license plates as there is a wide range of license plate styles written in Arabic, Kurdish, and English/Arabic languages, each different in style and color. This variety makes it difficult for recent traditional license plate recognition systems and algorithms to recognize all these license plate types using the same algorithm. In this work, a new method has been proposed to efficiently recognize all these types of license plates. This has been done by utilizing a series of algorithms for preprocessing and recognition with new identification strategies. The results show that the system recognized license plate numbers with higher accuracy, reaching up to 97.85%. However, the method field to detect license plates when there are some high deformations in plate numbers or when they are partially covered with mud, which makes it difficult to distinguish numbers.