How to recognize vehicle license / number plate (ANPR) from an image?

Question

Hi all,

I have a web site that allows users to upload images of cars and I would like to put a privacy filter in place to detect registration plates on the vehicle and blur them.

The blurring is not a problem but is there a library or component (open source preferred) that will help with finding a licence within a photo?

Caveats;

1. I know nothing is perfect and image recognition of this type will provide false positive and negatives.
2. I appreciate that we could ask the user to select the area to blur and we will do this as well, but the question is specifically about finding that data programmatically; so answers such as 'get a person to check every image' is not helpful.
3. This software method is called 'Automatic Number Plate Recognition' in the UK but I cannot see any implementations of it as libraries.
4. Any language is great although .Net is preferred.

Thanks in advance

Ryan

Answer 1

The blurring is not a problem but is there a library or component (open source preferred) that will help with finding a licence within a photo?

Ans: The CARMEN FreeFlow ANPR Software engine (Commerical)

Answer 2

I have done some googling about this a couple of months ago. There are quite a few papers about this topic, but I never found any concrete open-source implementation. There are a lot of commercial implementations though, but none of them with a price quote, so they're probably pretty expensive.

Answer 3

Any joy Ryan?

James - can you contact me?

Thanks

Answer 4

I came across this one that is written in java javaANPR, I am looking for a c# library as well.

I would like a system where I can point a video camera at some sailing boats, all of which have large, identifiable numbers on them, and have it identify the boats and send a tweet when they sail past a video camera.

Answer 5

It maybe work looking at Character recoqnition software as there are many libraries out there that perform the same thing. I reading an image and storing it. Micrsoft office is able to read tiff files and return alphanumerics

Answer 6

Hi.my final project is car plate recognation and i am usin c#. right now i w determined car plate region from image and set all character in car plate like different image. Now i need Ocr library,i will send image which has just one number or letter ,and i want to get what it is from output.so İs there any Ocr library.Can anybody offer me opensource library

Answer 7

you might also give a try at SimpleLPR

http://www.warelogic.com

Answer 8

Yes I use gocr at http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ its a commandline application which you could execute from your application. I use it in a couple of my applications.

Answer 9

There's an OCR API at http://www.wisetrend.com/wisetrend_ocr_cloud.shtml with some advanced detection options and XML output (which, if I remember correctly, will include both the detected text and the coordinates where the text was found) - you may be able to adapt this to your needs (blur at all coordinates where text was detected)

Answer 10

Have a look at Java ANPR. Free license plate recognition...

Answer 11

High performance ANPR Library - http://www.dtksoft.com/dtkanpr.php. This is commercial, but they provide trial key.