Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

Accurate Method for Malaysian-Cars Plate Recognition

Using Fast Wavelets Transform
1 1 2
Mohamed E. Gumah , Etienne Schneider , Abdurazzag Ali Aburas
1
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar31750; alrjele2004@yahoo.com, et.schneider@free.fr
2
International Islamic University Malaysia 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; aburas06@iiu.edu.my

ABSTRACT

Car plate recognition is one of the most useful practical applications of optical character recognition. It can be applied
in many different scenarios, such as access control, parking fares calculation, automatic tolls and parking payment,
traffic control, etc. As other OCR systems, the neural network is the most used technique in character recognition
stage. Thus, most of Car plate recognition systems are suffering from neural network weakness which is the tradeoff
between accuracy rate, and the computation time. In this paper, a new technique of optical character recognition that
relay on Fast wavelets transform (FWT) is proposed. The idea of the proposed technique is to use the FWT to
produce a coefficient vector of the character images which will be directly used to recognize the characters. Due to
the vehicle registration plates of Malaysia, our approach can be used to detect Malaysian car plates.

1. I NTRODUCTION

1.1 Discrete wavelets transform (DWT):

Wavelet transform is a computation that localizes a function in both space and scale. It’s
known as discrete wavelets transform if the wavelets are discretely sampled. Mostly, DWT is
used for signal coding, to represent a discrete signal in a more redundant form. For analyzing, the
signal (S) is passed through filters (low and high pass filters in each level) (F) with different
frequencies at different scales. The output of this process (known as Decomposition) will be two
sets of coefficients: the approximations (A) which is high-scale, low-frequency components of
the signal, and the details (D) which is the low-scale, high-frequency components. Figure (1)
shows the output of passing the signal S through one level of the transform [14].

Signal

Low-pass filter High-pass filter

A D

Figure1.One level of the transform

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 Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

1.2 Reconstruction (synthesis):

Reconstruction is the operation where the signal can be assembled back into the original
signal without loss of information. The mathematical manipulations that effects synthesis is
called the inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT). Figure (2) shows the reconstruction
diagram. The approximations and details coefficients will be used to reconstruct the signal back
into its original shape [14].

Decomposition Reconstruction

F F

S S

F F

Figure2. The reconstruction operation

1. PREVIOUS RELATED WORKS

Car plate recognition is an active research area and researchers used different kinds of
character recognition techniques including genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, support
vector machine, Markov processes, and finite automata [4].
Xiang, Xiuzi and Sanyuan, combined statistical and structural recognition method. First, they
used four statistical sub-classifiers to recognize the character. Then, they used structure
recognition method to further classify the similar characters. This method has small
improvement on the recognition rate over the Back Propagation neural network [5].
Tao, He, and Lou used segmentation technique, based on multiple threshold values
determined by fuzzy entropy and the prior knowledge on car plate character, to extract the car
plates, then, they used a combination of several recognizers. They reported recognition rate of
over 97% under various illumination conditions [6]. Tan and Chen proposed a candidate
verification algorithm for plate license localization. They adapted Otsu’s method, Bersen method
and Niblack method with post process to binarize images in different illumination. The output of
the proposed method is the binary car plate sent to the segmentation and recognition stages
directly. They reported recognition rate of 93.2% to 99.8%. [13]
Lopez, Gonzalez, Galindo, and Cabello used a set of redundant neural networks for the
recognition task, trained with different pattern sets to identify alphanumeric characters. In their
system, the entire process is repeated for different scales of the input image (which is re-
sampled) in order to make the system more robust and versatile. They reported recognition rate
up to 95% in scenarios with non-stationary backgrounds, and varying lighting conditions [2].
Wu and Zhang used an enhanced cascaded tree style learner framework for car plate
detection using the hybrid object features including the simple statistical features and Harr-like
features. Using adaptive boosting training scheme, they reported 94.5% of recognition rate [1].

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 Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

Cheng and LI Shao-Fa used simplified a pulse coupled neural network model with the
parameters determined by images’ spatial and grey characteristics automatically. Their work can
be considered as enhancement of Xin Yuan’s algorithm, which introduced the image
enhancement process based on a pulse coupled neural network model firstly. Using Xin Yuan’s
algorithm, a recognition rate of 98% can be achieved [7]. However, the neural network was used
by many researchers as recognition method, such as: [15], [16], and [17].
In this paper, we used the FWT to produce a coefficient vector of the character images. This
coefficient vector will be directly used to recognize the characters. Regarding to the vehicle
registration plates of Malaysia, our approach is suitable to be used to recognize Malaysian car
plates.

2. DISCUSSION
There are many techniques applied by different researchers in the recognition phase. The
neural network is the most used technique. Some of the researchers used multi-method to deal
with different types of characters used in car plates such as the combination of Chinese and
Roman characters or to deal with car plates with Arabic characters. While the multi-method
could improve the accuracy rate, it could effect the computation time which is very important in
any real-time car plate recognition. To circumvent the weakness of the artificial neural network
in order to get a high accuracy, we need to use many features that can provide enough
information, in this case we need to use complex artificial neural network that will need longer
response time. If we use a simple artificial neural network, the time will be reduced but the
accuracy will be reduced as well. Most of the reviewed papers did not report about the consumed
time which supposed to be long when neural network is used. The consumed time will be even
longer when combined methods are used [5], [6], and [13]. Our approach is to achieve the
recognition stage without using artificial neural network.

3.1 Malaysian cars plate:

The Malaysian license plate format consists of one or more letters (the first letter(s) serving
as a vehicle or location prefix) followed by up to four digits with no leading zeros. It may be in
the form of ABC 1234 in the local regulation. All vehicle license plates in Malaysia have white
characters on a black background. Arial Bold is normally used as the typeface of the letterings
[9].

3. EXPERIMENTS
In this paper, we focus only on the recognition stage. The whole system, which includes the
design of the interface between the PC and the Camera and the preprocessing steps such as plate
localization, plate orientation and sizing, plate normalization, and character segmentation, could
be part of a future work.
In our experimental work, we aim to:
1- Proof that the decomposition coefficient vector (DCV) is unique for each character
2- This DCV can be used to recognize the image.

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 Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

In [8], Gonzalea, Wood and Eddins developed a Matlab functions (wavefast and wavefilter) that
could generate wavelet decomposition and reconstruction filters. We are concerned only by the
decomposition part since we need only this part to get the DCV. Both functions were used in our
experimental work.
In our experimental work, we developed a Matlab function that achieves the segmentation
stage then calls a modified wavefast function to be applied on 40 pictures Figure (3) shows one
of the car pictures before preprocessing.

Figure 3. Car pictures before preprocessing

After preprocessing (plate detection) the car plate image is converted to binary image (this
step is important to reduce the noise) then the car plate image will be ready for segmentation
step.
Figure (4) shows the car plate (binary image) and the segmented number image

Figure 4. The car plate and the segmented number image

After segmentation, we obtained 10 images of each number (0-9). After applying wavefast
function, we got the DCV of the ten numbers; to avoid overlapped results, we divided the DCV
array into 3 parts and we tested the first and second part of DCV for each number (0 to9) Results
are shown in table (1).

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 Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

Plate The mean of coefficient decomposition vector

No 0 No 1 No2 No 3 No4 No 5 No 6 No7 No 8 No9

1 8.83 8.26 12.42 11.90 10.81 3.89 10.09 12.54 8.06 15.20
2 8.71 8.44 13.38 11.83 9.79 4.88 10.05 12.54 8.06 18.29
3 8.74 8.75 13.55 11.91 10.74 4.76 10.11 12.76 8.08 14.57
4 8.11 8.46 13.43 11.70 10.54 4.87 9.91 12.51 7.85 14.56
5 9.32 8.22 14.23 11.90 10.74 4.65 9.97 11.22 7.88 16.97
6 8.65 8.22 13.77 11.65 10.91 4.87 9.95 12.25 7.75 14.50
7 8.81 8.31 13.67 11.47 10.91 4.32 9.72 12.19 7.80 14.49
8 8.52 8.39 13.35 11.64 10.90 4.87 9.82 11.96 7.73 14.36
9 8.64 8.34 13.19 11.59 10.73 3.99 9.67 12.46 7.76 14.58
10 9.03 8.24 13.57 11.54 10.90 3.98 9.83 11.48 7.79 14.44

Table 1. First and second part of DCV

We can get a unique value for the numbers (0, 3, 5, 6, 8) from the first part of the DCV array,
For numbers (1, 2, 4, 9) we need to test the second part of the DCV array. Once more, the first
part of DCV of the number 7 is not clear, thus, we need to test the second part to give the number
7 a unique value that can be used to recognize it.
From table (1) we can see that the DCV can show almost unique value of each number (0
to9) .We can use the tired part of the DCV to increase the recognition accuracy level. We can
divide the DCV into 6 parts and test each part for all numbers to increase the accuracy of the
system. That might be a part of our future work.

4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, we presented a new method of characters recognition that utilizes fast wavelets
Transform (FWT). We used the FWT to produce a coefficient vector of the numbers images,
which will be directly used to recognize the characters. The same process can be done to produce
a coefficient vector of the letters images .Due to the vehicle registration plates of Malaysia, our
approach can be used to detect Malaysian car plates.
In our future work, we use this method as a recognition step for both numbers and characters in a
complete car plate recognition system. The system will include localization, orientation, sizing
and plate normalization steps. Road camera pictures will be used as well.

5. REFERENCES
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Cascaded Tree-Style Learner Based on Hybrid Object Features. Proceedings of the IEEE
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2- J.M. Lopez, J. Gonzalez, C. Galindo, and J. Cabello (2007). A versatile Low-cost Car Plate
Recognition System. Pan
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Recognition. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.
4- S. Lu, Z. Liu, Y.Chen, and L. Liu (2008). AWHD for License Plate Character. The 2008
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 Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

5- P Xiang, Y Xiuzi and Z Sanyuan (2004). A Hybrid Method for Robust Car Plate Character
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