ISSN: 2581-4419 Volume 1 Issue 1

Number Plate Recognition using Machine

Learning
PRASAD MOLAWADE1 SHRUTI SHANBHAG2 RUSHABH RALE3
PROF MANASI CHOCHE4
1-3
Students, Assistant Professor4

K.C. College of Engineering & Management Studies & Research, Kopri, Thane(E)-400063, India

Abstract - Number plate recognition is an image processing technology which uses

number (license) plate to identify the vehicle. The objective is to design an efficient
automatic authorized vehicle identification system by using the vehicle number plate. The
system can be implemented on the entrance for security control of a highly restricted area
like military zones or area around top government offices e.g. Parliament, Supreme Court
etc. The developed system first detects the vehicle and then captures the vehicle image.
Vehicle number plate region is then converted into grayscale. The number plate is then
extracted. Then, using KNN (K- Nearest Neighbours) algorithm is used to recognize the
digits and the alphabets. This data can be used to find vehicle’s owner, place of
registration, address, etc. The system is implemented using Python, and its performance
is tested on real images. It is observed from the experiment that the developed system
successfully detects and recognize the vehicle number plate on real images.

KEYWORDS: Image Processing; grayscale; KNN; Automatic Number Plate Recognition System; e-challan

I. INTRODUCTION

Due to the increasing number of vehicles nowadays, the modern city needs to establish the
effective and efficient automatic traffic system for the management of the traffic law
enforcement. Number plate recognition leads the significant role in this condition. The number
plate recognition is an image processing technique to extract the image of license plate on
vehicle taken by digital camera or taken by either a colour or a grayscale digital camera, as
well as an infrared camera in order to identify the vehicles using their number plate.

The Number Plate Recognition system recognizes characters on license plate through the
combination of various techniques and algorithms, including image pre-processing, object
detection, character segmentation and recognition. It consists of a camera to detect the number
plate object and processing unit to process and extract the characters and interpret the pixels
into numerically readable characters. The ANPR system has been used in traffic law
enforcement, including speed camera, traffic light camera, stolen car detection, and border
monitoring. It can be used also for the building management, such as parking management and
gate control.
With the rapid development of highway and the wide use of vehicles, people have started to
pay more and more attention on the advanced, efficient and accurate intelligent transportation
systems (ITSs). The Number plate recognition task is quite challenging from vehicle images
due to the view point changes, when vehicle bodies and license plate have similar colour, multi-
style plate formats, and the non-uniform outdoor illumination conditions during image
acquisition.

Machine learning approaches the problem in a different way. The idea is to take a large number
of number plates, known as training data and then develop a system which can learn from those
training examples. In other words, the machine learning uses the examples to automatically
infer rules for recognizing number plate. Furthermore, by increasing the number of training
examples, the network can learn more about numbers and characters, and so improve its
accuracy.

II. PROBLEM STATEMENT

There is an escalating increase of contemporary local, urban and national road networks over
the last decades. This has emerged the need for efficient monitoring and management of road
traffic. The goal of this project is to create a model that will be able to recognize and determine
the number plate from its image appropriately.
Due to the varying characteristics of the license plate from country to country like numbering
system, colours, language of characters, style (font) and sizes of license plate, further research
is still needed. The major goal of the proposed system is understanding Convolutional Neural
Network, and applying it to the number plate recognition system.

III. LITERATURE REVIEW

During the last few years, the development of machine learning algorithms has gained progress
in many aspects. Nowadays, with the increasing number of vehicles, number plate scanning
using machine learning algorithms like K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) will be useful as manual
efforts of humans will decrease along with the error rates. Also, the accuracy of machine
learning algorithms is quite high.

IV. EXISTING SYSTEM

The existing system to determine the details of a vehicle requires a lot of human interaction
which also leads to human errors. For example, the e-challan fined by the traffic officials is as
follows. A CCTV camera continuously records footage of the ongoing traffic. If a motorist
breaks any traffic rule, the act will be recorded in the footage. The police will try to extract the
number from the vehicle’s screen-shot captured from the CCTV footage and the offense will
be registered in the records. This process requires a lot of human resource which can be reduced
by using the following algorithm to recognize the registered vehicle number.
 V. PROPOSED SYSTEM

The first step towards Number Plate Detection is database collection which has been collected
from Kaggle.com, one of the most popular and trustworthy sites which contains a variety of
different datasets.
This dataset obtained contains number plates of different cars from different states having huge
variation in their registration numbers.
The next step involves data preparation using the dataset obtained from Kaggle.

For preparation of our data, we implement the following steps:

• Data cleaning

• Reorder our data according to the pixel density.

• Splitting of data for Training and Testing.

• Create input samples.

• Create target outputs for the training and test sets.

• Convert data prepared to .png files.

After the acquisition of dataset and implementing data preparation techniques on such data the
next step involves implementation of KNN algorithm to identify the characters on number
plate.

Flowchart of the proposed system.

 VI. RESULTS

Initially, the camera will be used to capture the image. Once the image is captured, the
algorithm will process it by converting it into grayscale, followed by extracting the possible
number plates and finally recognizing the registration number of the vehicle. The final
registration details will be searched from the database and will be displayed on the screen.

VII. CONCLUSION

Machine Learning Algorithms such as KNN is very effective for vehicle number plate
recognition using machine learning. It consists of the outcomes of the result analysed based on
the various parameters such as recognition of individual character and a digit success ratio of
recognition for the success of identifying selected set of a character from group of characters
and digits. From the above results, we can conclude that number plate recognition will perform
better as the quality of the camera used for scanning the plate will be excellent. Using low
quality camera will degrade the performance and may misclassify the characters.
 VIII. REFERENCES

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