A Simple License Plate Recognition System for

Spanish License Plates

Xavier Gironés Sancho

Student in Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence,

Universitat Rovira i Virgili,
Av. Paı̈sos Catalans 26,
E-43007 Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain
e-mail: xavier@girones.com

Abstract. This paper presents a straightforward method of identifying

and recognizing vehicle license plates, which has been successfully used
in a “real world” product. The system consists of three main modules:
Plate area detection, character segmentation and clustering, and plate
number recognition. In the plate area detection module, a multiresolu-
tion histogram analysis method is proposed. This method implements
an effective acceptability filter. Then, character candidates are singled
out and arranged in clusters. Finally, each plate character is recognized
by template matching and the best overall plate candidate is selected.
The system was evaluated in an image set of 120 vehicle pictures and it
achieved roughly a 90% recognition rate.
Keywords: Articles, LPR, License Plate Recognition.

1 Introduction
Automatic vehicle license plate recognition (LPR) has been one of the classical
subjects in computer vision since its inception. While far from being trivial, the
intrinsic characteristics of license plates qualify this problem as one of the most
accessible in the realm of pattern recognition in natural images. Applications
of LPR are numerous: traffic control and monitoring, parking access, vehicle
management. It can be used as well to detect security violations such as entering
restricted areas without clearance, occupying reserved lanes or parking spaces,
surpassing speed limits, stolen car detection, red light crossing. . .
There are many commercial systems in the market, some of them intended
for general purpose and some optimized for a specific duty. Usually optimiza-
tions take the form of improved recognition accuracy/speed at the expense of
constraints on the image to be recognized. Constraints can be on the position
and distance from the camera to the license plates, the inclination, the level of
illumination, absence of shadows and so on. There are nearly as many different
approaches to LPR as systems are in the market, since a LPR system typi-
cally consists of several functional blocks, and each block can be implemented
in many different ways. For instance, a plate area detection stage could possibly
be implemented using the Hough transform to find the plate rectangle, or more
commonly, locating the plate texture using invariant moments, Fourier, Gabor,
wavelet, histogram or interlacing analysis to name only a few.
This paper describes a straightforward method for detecting license plates
and recognizing their corresponding license plate number (SimpleLPR). The
product in which this method was implemented was on a tight schedule and the
entire development cycle took less than two months. The trade off was that the
simplest methods available were to be used, as there was no time to experiment
with relatively sophisticated techniques such as wavelet analysis, neural network
or support vector machine classifiers, which surely would have led to improved
performance and recognition rates. In spite of this limitation, the system per-
formed surprisingly well (see http://www.warelogic.com).

2 Description

Figure 1 on the facing page shows a diagram of the architecture of the current
solution. It can be regarded as a pipeline of processing blocks, each stage tak-
ing the input of its predecessor and delivering its output to its successor. At
functional level three main processing blocks can be identified.

1. License plate area detection. Acceptability filter. Finds suitable areas in the
image based on their histogram distribution.
2. Thresholding, shape segmentation and clustering. Finds an optimal thresh-
old for the candidate plate area by analyzing its histogram information.
Segments shapes and finds clusters of aligned character candidates.
3. Character identification by template matching and plate verification. For
each shape, finds its correlation value with all members in the predefined set
of character templates. This set consists of templates of all characters that
can be found in Spanish license plates. Only candidates that can result in
valid license plate numbers are considered.

In the first place, either a front or rear image of the vehicle must be acquired.
An effort has been put in allowing unconstrained images as input. Images can
come from a variety of sources, they can be pictures from a digital camera or
frames from a video stream source. They can also be in either RGB or grayscale
color spaces. Neither special optics nor infrared illumination sources are required,
in contrast to many LPR systems in the market. The implication is that our sys-
tem does not rely on crisp images and accurate colors. Hence, it must be able to
deal with certain amount of blurring and graininess in the input pictures. Nev-
ertheless, to achieve an acceptable detection rate a few conditions have to be
met. Preferably the plate picture should be visible at a straight angle ± 30 deg
from the license plate plane normal vector, as the current solution does not pro-
vide for affine rectification. In addition there should not be obstacles occluding
the license plate characters and, ideally, character height should be 32 pixels or
taller.
 Image Acquisition
Vehicle License
Plate Multiresolution
histogram analysis

4 - 8595
5 - 8872
6 - 9560
2 - 8550 4562BMC
B - 8982 Best candidate
Segmentation and selection
M - 8832
clustering
C - 8658
Template matching and
verification

Fig. 1. Main blocks in the SimpleLPR system

2.1 Plate Area Detection by Histogram Multiresolution Analysis

The main goal of this block is to work as acceptability filter, namely discard all
areas in the image where there is almost no likelyhood that a license plate is to
be found there. It is tuned to get as few as false rejections (FRR) as possible,
at the expense of an increased rate of false accept errors (FAR). The plate
area detection algorithm takes advantage of the particularities of the histogram
distribution [1] of Spanish license plates. The ordinary Spanish license plate
features black characters on a white background. Hence, its derived histogram
should display a bimodal distribution, with two well defined peaks. Figure 2
shows a typical license plate of the kind this system is tailored for and Figure 3
shows its associated histogram for the lightness channel.
However, a plain search for areas in the image that exhibit a bimodal distri-
bution would not be acceptable in terms of FAR, there would be just too many.
To narrow the search further, SimpleLPR takes also into account relationships
amongst neighboring image areas. In particular, the following steps are taken:
 Fig. 2. Picture of a license plate Fig. 3. Histogram of the plate area

1. Split the input image into 24×4 pixel windows and calculate their histogram
distributions. If images are in RGB colorspace this step is repeated for each
channel.
2. Build a dyadic histogram pyramid where each element Hi,j on the new level
L is defined by the recurrence formula:
L L−1 L−1 L−1 L−1
Hi,j = H2i,2j + H2i,2j+1 + H2i+1,2j + H2i+1,2j+1 (1)

The process stops just before the use of the recurrence formula would leave  
W H
 

less than 8 elements across any of the axes. Namely LMAX = min Log2 ( 8·24 ) , Log2 ( 8·4 )
where W and H are the image width and height respectively.
3. Build a gaussian pyramid [1] of the input image of the same height as the
histogram pyramid. In case the image was originally in RGB color space it
will be first converted to grayscale.
4. Starting at the coarsest level of the histogram pyramid. For each level of
detail and while no plates are found:
(a) Look for 4-connected groups with more than 4 elements that meet the
conditions below:
i. Intra-element. Each histogram must conform to a bimodal distribu-
tion. In addition, if the image is RGB peak locations on each channel
must be the same up to scale.
ii. Inter-element. The locations of the peaks of all elements in the group
must be the same up to a threshold. If the image is RGB this has to
be enforced channel wise.
(b) When such a group is found activate the next stage in the pipeline 2.2
passing along
– The location and bounding box of the group
– Peak intensities for each channel
– The level of detail (LOD)

Figure 4 on the next page shows the histogram windows for LOD 4 and 5
where the condition stated in 4(a)i is met. In the next step, after the condition
in 4(a)ii is enforced, only windows belonging to the license plate area will remain.
The algorithm described above is especially fit for this task because, aside
from plate location candidates, it returns the intensities of the histogram light
and dark peaks. As it is shown in section 2.2, these values are later used to
calculate an optimum threshold for binarization.
Fig. 4. Areas selected by the multiresolution histogram filter for scale levels 4
and 5. Window sizes are 24×4 and 96×16 respectively

2.2 Thresholding, Shape Segmentation and Clustering

Once an area in the image has been identified as a license plate candidate, the
next step is to isolate the characters that make up the plate number. From the
previous section we get the candidate bounding box (CBB ), the level of detail
(LOD) and the peak intensities per channel (PIC ). LOD is used to select an
image in the gaussian pyramid that becomes the working image. Selecting the
right working scale results in a 4× performance gain for each level we go up from
level 0. The license plate character isolation is accomplished in four steps:
1. Binarization. The PIC values are used to calculate a threshold level that
lays in between the dark/light peaks. Then, an auxiliary binary image with
the same dimensions as the working image is created and its pixel values set
in accordance with the following rule:

0 : IWRK (x, y) < Treshold
IAUX (x, y) = (2)
1 : IWRK (x, y) > Treshold

2. Shape segmentation. The flood fill [1] algorithm is used on the binarized
image to detect shapes that become the character candidates. In case a shape
is too large or too small it is pruned.
3. Clustering. A variant of the k-means [2] clustering algorithm is used to
locate groups of shapes arranged along a straight line. The rules to decide
that a group of shapes forms a cluster are
(a) Their centers lie on a straight line. This is determined via principle com-
ponent analysis [1] (PCA).
 (b) The distance between neighboring items is regular up to a threshold.
(c) The height of the shapes taken from the line that connects their centers
is constant up to a threshold.
(d) There are more than four elements in the cluster.
Figures 5 and 6 illustrate the operation of the clustering algorithm. The
shapes in the clusters are joined with a straight line. Bounding boxes are
also represented.

Fig. 5. B&W image with four separated text groups

Fig. 6. The four text groups are singled out as a result of the execution of the
clustering algorithm on the image in Figure 5
4. Rotation compensation. The template matching algorithm discussed in 2.3
requires character candidates and templates to be aligned in order to oper-
ate properly. This step performs a rotation transform on the plate candidate
that aligns the cluster baseline with the x axis. This is illustrated in Figures 7
and 8.

Fig. 7. Binarized image of the li- Fig. 8. License plate after the rota-
cense plate shown prior rotation tion compensation

2.3 Character Identification by Template Matching and Plate

Verification
The goal of this block is to turn a list of grayscale raster character candidates
into a license plate number (LPN ). Candidates are matched with the templates
of all possible symbols using cross-correlation [1]:
XX
c(x, y) = f (s, t)w(x + s, y + t) (3)
s t

Table 1 on the following page shows some correlation values of character candi-
dates with templates computed using (3). Of course, one could just compose a
plate number by just keeping the symbols with maximum cross-correlation, but
this would be flawed approach. An effective algorithm should take into account
the following considerations:
– There are symbols nearly indistinguishable from each other correlation wise.
For instance 0 and O, 1 and I, 8 and B.
– There can be extra shapes at the front or at the tail of the candidate list
that do not correspond to license plate characters. Chances are that random
shapes nearby the license plate with the right size and alignment are included
in the candidate list. For example, depending on the environment conditions
one could get BT6300AKIII.
As the problem definition involves constraints and weights, a constrained opti-
mization problem solver (COPS ) must be employed. SimpleLPR implements an
ad hoc COPS that attempts to accomplish the following goals:
– LPN candidates must be valid Spanish license plates.
 Character candidate Template symbol Correlation value

T 5473
I 4840
Y 4788
1 4768
6 6044
G 5482
8 5456
0 5315
3 5974
S 5199
8 5145
9 4958
0 6111
O 5939
D 5841
G 5497
0 6202
O 6039
D 5983
G 5510
A 4187
4 4156
X 3684
J 3653
K 5528
X 4723
F 4311
R 4057
Table 1. Character candidates along with the 4 topmost similar templates and
their correlation values

– Only the 3 topmost symbols with maximum correlation values are considered
on each character candidate.
– Maximize the LPN sum of correlation values.
– Maximize the LPN string length. For example, 0123BTV would take
precedence over O1238T.

3 Results
The system was initially evaluated in an image set of 120 pictures of vehicle
license plates. The computer was a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz. Images were acquired
using a low end Creative DC-2320 digital camera. Their sizes ranged from 640 ×
480 pixels to 1600 × 1200 pixels. The recognition rate was approximately 90% as
109 pictures were successfully recognized. Typical detection times ranged from
.1 seconds to 1.2 seconds depending on the image size and the relative size of the
plate within the image. The remaining 11 plates that were incorrectly recognized
or not recognized at all can be classified according to their error types.
– 3 cases where the plate characters merged with the plate borders due to
dirtiness.
– 2 cases where two plate characters were merged due to a scratch.
– 1 case where a plate character had a bump.
– 2 case where the pictures were taken with more than 30 deg slant.
– 1 case where the licence plate characters where shorter than 32 pixels.
– 1 case where there was a hard shadow that rendered the plate impossible to
binarize using a single threshold.
– 1 case where the ambient light was blue.

In spite of its limitations, the system has been successfully used to assist the
classification of vehicle pictures in applications where the license plate number
had previously to be entered manually.

4 Conclusions

A straightforward license plate recognition system has been presented. It per-

forms reasonably well on most license plate images. It is tolerant to scale and
rotation transforms, but it does not provide for affine rectification in case of
pictures taken at oblique angles. In addition, the long recognition times makes
it unsuitable for real time video applications. The system presented here can be
considered a corroboration of the 80%/20% rule. With relatively little develop-
ment effort and using the plainest techniques available it achieves a decent 90%
success rate with less than a second recognition time. However, it is the author’s
opinion that bridging the gap to achieve a 99% recognition rate cannot be accom-
plished without redesigning the system from scratch. Particularly, the current
character segmentation algorithm involves connectivity and thresholding, which
are inherently weak; and general affine rectification should also be provided. In
addition, cross-correlation performs poorly when compared with ANN or SVM
based classifiers. It is the author’s purpose to address these issues in a future
work, which will be targeted at real time video surveillance applications.

References
1. C. Gonzales, Richard E. Woods, Digital Image Processing (fourth edition). Prentice
Hall, 2002. 2.1, 3, 2, 3a, 2.3
2. S. Theodoridis, K. Koutroumbas, Pattern recognition (second edition). Elsevier,
2003. 3