AUTOMATIC CAR PLATE NUMBER RECOGNITION

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
Over the years, vehicles have been used to perpetrate crimes such as robbery and kidnapping.
Auto theft has also been a major issue to the nation. This Automatic Car Plate Number
Recognition system will be of great help to the Law enforcement agencies.

SOLUTION

My system will function to automatically capture an image of the vehicle’s license plate,
transform that image into alphanumeric characters using optical character recognition or similar
software, compare the plate number acquired to one or more databases of vehicles of interest to
law enforcement and other agencies, and to alert the officer when a vehicle of interest has been
observed. The automated capture, analysis, and comparison of vehicle license plates typically
occur within seconds, alerting the officer almost immediately when a wanted plate is observed. It
should be noted that human intervention is needed in so far as the officer monitoring the
equipment must independently validate that the ACPR system has accurately “read” the license
plate, that the plate observed is issued from the same state as the one in which it is wanted, and to
verify the currency of the alert, for example, verifying that the reason this vehicle or the owner
was wanted or of interest is still valid. Technologies to enhance their enforcement and
investigative capabilities, expand their collection of relevant data, and time consuming process of
manually comparing vehicle license plates with lists of stolen, wanted, and other vehicles of
interest has to be developed. Police officers, and other law enforcement practitioners are often on
the lookout for vehicles that have been reported stolen, are wanted in connection with a crime or
traffic violation, are suspected of being involved in criminal or terrorist activities, are parking
violation scofflaws, have failed to maintain current registration or to comply with statutory
insurance requirements, or any of a number of other legitimate reasons. This software aspect of
the system will run on standard home computer hardware and can be linked to other applications
or databases. It will first use a series of image manipulation techniques to detect, normalize and
enhance the image of the car plate, and then optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the
alphanumeric of the license plate.