Automatic Extraction Method for License Plate Character Blurred by Translucent Object

Abstract:

Characters on license plate, which is obscured by water or mist, is hard to be recognized through classical license plate recognition technology. In order to get higher recognition rate of blurred character in practical license plate recognition system, an approach to separate characters from a blurred image of vehicle license plate is proposed in this paper. At first, the upper, lower, left and right boundaries of blurred character are assumed to be foreground sample; the broken boundary of character is considered as background sample. At the position of background white scribbles are drawn; in contrast, midpoints of the lines along foreground are painted with black scribbles. Then a scribble image is generated automatically. Furthermore, closed form solution to natural image matting is adopted to obtain the background that is uncovered license plate according to the scribble image. The experiments show that the new algorithm is applicable and helpful to get higher recognition rate of blurred license plate.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 204-210)
• Pages: 1884-1890
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.204-210.1884
• Online since: February 2011
• Authors: Fang Fang Liang, Yong Liu, Xi Yan Wu, Gang Yao
• Keywords: Automatic Scribble Image, Blurred License Plate, Character Segmentation, Natural Image Matting

References

[1] Shih-Chieh Lin and Chih-Ting Chen, Reconstructing Vehicle License Plate Image from Low Resolution Images using Nonuniform Interpolation Method, International Journal of Image Processing, vol. 1 (2007), pp.21-28.

DOI: 10.1109/iccis.2008.4670746

[2] Jin Zhang, Huirong Chen, and Gang Rong. Motion blur removal based on restoration error analysis, Proc. SPIE, vol. 5672(2005), pp.322-330.

[3] Zhang Jin, Chen Huirong, and Rong Gang, Motion blurred image restoration based on wave equation, Journal of Tsinghua University, vol. 45(2005) , pp.1002-1004+1008.

[4] Qi, Lin, Dong, Junyu, Liu, Yan, Duan, Yuanxu, Zhang and Chunxia, Removing color stain on vehicle license plates based on photometric stereo and a hole-filling algorithm, 2008 Congress on Image and Signal Processing, vol. 3 (2008) , pp.27-30.

DOI: 10.1109/cisp.2008.207

[5] Liang Fangfang, Liu Yong and Yao Gang, Recognition of blurred license plate of vehicle based on natural image matting, Proc. SPIE, vol. 7495 (2009), 749527-749527-6.

DOI: 10.1117/12.833579

[6] PORTIJR T., and DUFF.T., Compositing digital images, In SIGGRAPII, vol. 18(1984) , pp.253-259.

[7] A. Berman, P. Vlahos and A. Dadourian, A Comprehensive method for removing from an image the background surrounding a selected object, U S Patent(2000).

[8] A. Berman ,A. Dadourian and P. Vlahos, Method for removing from an image the background surrounding a selected object. U.S. Patent, 134-346(2000).

[9] Ruzon M and Tomasi C, Alpha estimation in natural images, Proc. of IEEE CVPR, vol. 1 (2000) , p.1018–1025.

[10] Hillman P, Hannah J and Renshaw D, Alpha channel estimation in high resolution images and image sequences, In Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2001), p.1, 1063-1068.

DOI: 10.1109/cvpr.2001.990648

[11] CHUANG Y, CURLESS B and SALESIN D, etal, A Bayesian Approach to Digital Matting, Proc. of IEEE CVPR, (2001), p.2, 264-271.

DOI: 10.1109/cvpr.2001.990970

[12] J. Sun, J.Y. Jia C.K. Tang, and H.Y. Shum, Poisson Matting, ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 23 (2004) , pp.315-321.

DOI: 10.1145/1015706.1015721

[13] Leo Grady , Thomas Schiwietz and Shmuel Aharon, Random walks for interactive alpha-matting, In Proceedings of Visualization Imaging and Image Processing, (2005) , pp.423-429.

[14] Rother, C., Blake A., and Kolmogorov, V. Grabcut - interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph cuts, ACM Trans. Graph, vol. 23 (2004), p.309~314.

DOI: 10.1145/1015706.1015720

[15] Y. Li, J. Sun, C. -K. Tang and H. -Y. Shum, Lazy Snapping, ACM Transaction on Graphics, vol. 23 (2004), p.303–308.

DOI: 10.1145/1015706.1015719

[16] A. Levin, A. Rav-Acha and D. Lischinski, Spectral matting, In CVPR, (2007), p.1, 5, -7.

DOI: 10.1109/cvpr.2007.383147

[17] Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, and Yair Weiss, A Closed Form Solution to Natural Image Matting, IIEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, (2008), pp.228-242.

DOI: 10.1109/tpami.2007.1177

[18] Richard O. Duda and Peter E. Hart, Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures, Communications of the ACM, vol. 15, (1972) , p.11–15.

DOI: 10.1145/361237.361242

[19] Hideyuki Tamura, Shunji Mori, and Takashi Yamawaki. Textural Features Corresponding to Visual Perception, IEEE Transactions on Systems. Man and Cybernetics, (1978) , pp.460-473.

DOI: 10.1109/tsmc.1978.4309999