A RECOGNITION OF VEHICLE LICENSE PLATE

USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM BASED SEGMENTATION

Sang Kyoon Kim, Due Wook Kim and Hang Joon Kim
Dept. of Computer Engineering, Kyung Pook National University,
Taegu, 702-70 1, Korea

ABSTRACT
Extracting a license plate is an important stage in the
automatic vehicle identification. It is very difficult
because vehicle images are usually degraded and
processing the images is computationally intensive. In
this paper, we propose a new method to extract the
plate region using a distributed genetic algorithm. The
algorithm offers robustness in dealing with deformation
of vehicle images and inherent parallelism to improve
processing time. A test with seventy images shows an
extraction rate of 92.8% working well with the real
world situations. This results suggest that the proposed
method is pertinent to be put into practical use.

1. INTRODUCTION
Automatic Vehicle Identification(AVI) system is of
cowiderable interest because of its potential applications
to such areas as automatic location of a specific
vehicle, automatic payment of highway toll fee,
automatic payment of parking fee, automatic calculation
of traffic volume, and so on. To identify a vehcle,
features such as color, model and a license number can
be used. Since the license number has a unique
information of a vehicle, the recognition of a license
plate has been studied for several years[l-31.
To develop an automatic recognition system of the
license plate, a stable extraction of the plate region is
very important task and front-end processing stage.
Conventional method for the extraction can be divided
into three major classes. One is based on a vertical
edge detection using Hough Transform(HT), and the
basic assumption of it is that only a license plate has
vertical edges in front image of a vehicle[ 1-21.

0-7803-3258-x/96/$5.00 0 1996 IEEE

However, many vehicle images have vertical edges

from a radiator. Also using HT is very sensitive to
deformation of a plate boundary and also needs much
processing time. Another approach is to use a difference
of a gray value[3-4]. Though it shows better
performance than the edge detection, it still has
difficulties extracting the plate because a vehicle image
has many similar parts of gray values to the plate
region. The third attempts to overcome the previous
shortcomings by including color information[91. Rather
than using a gray value, the idea is to use a unique
color of the plate region. The major problems are that:
(1) it isn't easy to devise an equation determining a
color of a pixel from only RGB values; (2) simple
horizontal-to-vertical(HV) histogram results in many
errors, specially in a vehicle image that has similar
color between a vehicle body and a plate region.
In this paper, we present a distributed genetic
algorithm based segmentation approach to plate region
extraction.
The
algorithm
is
a
heuristic
searchloptimization technique of focusing on a subset of
eventually lead to
promising solutions which
convergence to a globally optimal solution. It is robust
in that it is relatively unaffected by the presence of
spurious local optima in the solution space. Moreover,
altematively to standard genetic algorithms, in the
algorithm selection and mating take place within locally
distributed subgroups of individuals rather than the
whole population, so that this mechanism can be run
independently and in parallel on each subgroup. With
the abilities of the algorilthm, we devise an alternative
method which overcomes the aforementioned problems.
The method we proposed here is simple, robust,
unsupervised and highly parallel.

66 1

2. SYSTEM OVE

L = 1 (White)

An overview of our extraction method is shown in

Fig 1 After capturing an input image from a vehicle, a
Red-Green-Blue(RGB) color space of the image is
transformed to a Hue- Lightness-Saturation(HLS) color
space. In the segmentation stage, a label image is
generated with a distributed genetic algorithm From the
label image, we extract the plate region by applying
some heuristic rules

(0degree)

Cyan
(180 deg

L=O(Black)

MznColor= min (red,green, blue)

MaxColor= max (red,green, blue)
&dh= red- Mincolor
GYeenh = green - MinColor
Blueh= blue - MinColor

120Y Greenh
Hue= ___
( if MinColor is blue)
(Redh GYt?f?nh)

+
Hue = 240 + -___
120 Redh
(Redh+ Blue
Hue= 12'

Fig 1. Overview of the extraction method

lZo Bzueh
(BlUeh
Greend- ( if MinColor is red)
h)

( if inc col or

iq green)

Lightness = MinColor+MmCoIor
2

ETHODOLOGY
3.1. Color space transform
This step prepares an input image to be color
segmented by converting RGB colors to HLS values.
An Input 256 color image is represented usmg a RGB
palette. The RGB model is good for color representation
on a color monitor. However, the human visual system
is less sensitive to change in color than to changes in
brightness, so it makes sense to convert RGB image
data into a color space that treats tint, shade and tone.
The HLS model is one of intuitive color model which
represents them efficiently[5,6].
As shown in Fig. 2, the HLS model is three
dunensional color space which consists of Hue,
Lightness and Saturation. The vertical axis represents
lightness from white to black. The horizontal line from
the center of the double cone represents saturation. Hue
d by an angle centering around the
. The HLS parameters are calculated with
functions in Fig. 2.
3.2. Segmentation of image
In this step, we segment an input image with a
distributed genetic algorithm[7]. The segmentation

Saturation= mColor+MinColor
MaxColor- MinColor (if LightnesslO.5)
MaxColor- MinColoL ( Othenuise)
- MaxColor- MinCobr

,where 'h denotes pure hue.

Fig. 2. HLS model and functions
process is a function taking an image as input and
returning a label image as output. Under a distributed
genetic algorithm, the representation of this function is
iteratively modified until a function yielding a accurate
segmentation is found. Each pixel is attributed a
classifier The chromosome is composed of two parts.
One part a chromosome is codmg for determines the
label it bears, and, subsequently, the label assigned to
the pixel on which it is lying. The other part a
chromosome is coding for is a feature vector which can
be any set of values computable from the image The
value of each part is initialized by two steps. Firstly,
each chromosome is gwen a random label value
uniformly chosen in the set $2 of possible labels.
Secondly, for each feature vector gene, the chromosomes
of label 1 are assigned values according to a Gaussian
distribution N( p (I), a ) . The maximal size of set E is

662

for characters and the other for a background. There are

four types of Korean license plates according to the use
of a vehicle In t h ~ s work, we consider only private

fixed with sixteen. The value of a pixel is determined

by the HLS value of eight contiguous points. This plays
a role of local smoothing operation by blending
irrelevant pixels into larger color group.
The method consists in iteratively repeating the
following three main steps, until a stopping criterion is
met:
Evaluation: For each chromosome k, compute a
distance between the actual feature vector x measured
on the image at its location and the vector y for which

vehicles which have white characters and a green

background. To extract a plate region, we use two
characteristics of Korean license plates: (1) the color
combination of a plate and characters is unique and this
combination occurs only in a plate region; (2) the
structural feature of a Korean license plate is that the
horizontal to vertical ratio of a plate length is 2.2 to 1.
It is possible to extract the plate region with these
simple heuristic rules because the original image is well
segmented in the previous step. Fig. 3 shows an

it is coding. The actual feature vector x is a

transformed HLS value. Each HLS value is normalized
between 0 and 100. The smaller the distance, the
greater fitness f(k) of the chromosome. The distance is
calculated as follows.

example of a Korean license plate

Green BackFourld

White Character

Selection: Replace each chromosome by a neighbor

(possibly itself), according to the fitness of the

neighboring chromosomes. Neighborhood are 5 X 5
metrics around a point. We use an elitist selection
scheme, also known as local tournament selection(LTS)
as selection mechanism: the chromosome with the
highest fitness value in the neighborhood is selected.
Muting: For each chromosome, look for a neighboring
coding which has the same label. Recombine the current
chromosome by this neighbor. Replace the current
chromosome by one of two offspring. At the mating
stage, the crossover and mutation is occurred. From
generation to generation, this process leads to
increasingly better chromosomes. The crossover and
mutation probability is set as 0.5 and 0.1.
At each time step, the system stability is given by
the percentage of pixels on the segmented image that
are assigned the label they had at the previous time
step. At any given time step, the stability criterion is
reached if the stability is above a stability threshold.
The stability threshold is 95%. The stopping criterion is
reached when the stability criterion has met for a
predefined number. We predefined the number with 5.
If the number of generation is over the maximal
number of generation, the stopping criterion is also
reached. The maximal number of generation is 100.
3.3. Extraction of a plate region
In this step, a plate region is extracted with simple

heuristic rules from the segmented image. A Korean

license plate is composed of two different colors; one

2.2

Fig. 3. A Korean license plate of a private vehicle

4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

To evaluate the practical performance of the proposed

method, experiments were done for 70 vehicle images.
The images are taken frorn a video camera located at a
fixed position and selected manually from continuous
scenes of vehicles. We implement the method on a
Pentium PC with C+t language under window
environment and use SAMSUNG SV-33 camcoder as an
input device.
Fig. 5 shows the label images for the original image
of Fig. 4. In the segmentation, maximal 14 labels are
permitted. But chromosomes of label 4, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14,
15, 16 are eliminated because of the deficiency of
fitness. We finally extraci. label 3 as a plate region by
applying some heuristics to the label images of Fig. 5.
Though much time is consumed in the segmentation
step, it could be reduced by implementing the method
under parallel environment. In order to assess the
performance of our method, we implement methods
which use HT[1] and gray value[4], and test them with
the same the 70 images, respectively. Table 2 shows
that the correct extraction rate of our algorithm is
higher than that of other method. Errors from our
algorithm are resulted from images which are very
deformed and also have very similar color between a

663

has the potential for extracting the plate region working

well w t h real-world lmages The advantages of the
method is that (1) it provides a robustness in dealing
wth degraded vehicle images, (2) it extract more
efficiently the plate regon even from a mage which
has similar color between a vehicle body and a plate

vehcle body and a plate region, or where the size of a

plate region is very small compared with the whole
image.

region (3) it has inherent parallelism to improve

processing time
Though the performance of the proposed method is
very good, it could be improved further by using a
more efficient representation model of color Future
works mclude also implementation of the method with
parallel facilities

Fig. 4. Original Image(450 X 360)

REFERENCES
[I] H J Choi, "A study on the extraction and
recognition of a car number plate by image
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[2] H S. Kim et al, "Recognition of a car number
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[3] B T Cheon et al, "The extraction of a number
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[4] H S Chong and 4 J Cho, "Locating Car License
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[5] Peter Buger and Duncan Gillies, Interactive
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[6] K Kanamori, M Naka and H Kotera, "Color

Fig. 5 Segmented Image

Table 1 Extraction results

Orrect
extraction(#)
Extraction
ratd%',

HT

Gray Value

Our method

57/70

5 9/70

65/70

81 4%

84 3%

92 8%

5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a new extraction method
of a license plate using a distributed genetic algorithm.
The conventional researches on the extraction of the
plate region have difficulties dealing with degraded
images and requiring much processing time To
overcoine the difficulties, we devised a method using a
distributed genetic algorithm based segmentation and
some heuristic rules.
Experimental results showed that the proposed method
664

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[9] E R. Lee, P. K. Kim and H. J Kim, "Automatic
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