A design method for Malaysian car plates character segmentation based on skew correction

Abstract

This paper presents a license plate character segmentation method in the context of Malaysian cars. First of all, pre-processing steps will enhance the image before Laplacian pyramid takes place. For a proper binarization, Laplacian pyramid which up-sampled the image from an image lower in the pyramid when the image is captured under low resolution. By using Sobel edge detector and then median filtering, circumscribe rectangle of minimum area is formed and the angle is calculated. At the same time, the area of characters is focussed. The characters are then selected based on connected component analysis after applying Niblack's threshold. Our goal is to segment the characters properly from the steps mentioned. Therefore, our algorithm tries to find the best point to segment the characters using little prior knowledge. Experimental shows promising results on the flexibility of the proposed design method.