近年來車輛俱以日增，為了有效控管車輛，我們研發一套車牌辨識系統可應用於停車管控、贓車追緝與車輛檢驗等範疇。本篇論文提出一套低運算量、高辨識率的車牌辨識流程，並實現了在ARM平台上車牌辨識系統的開發與規劃，以節省成本，同時達到即時偵測的效能。
車牌辨識系統主要有三個階段：1. 車牌偵測、2. 字元分割、3. 字元辨識，我們提出一個以小波為基礎的車牌偵測，利用紋理特徵、投影量、群組化的概念將車牌擷取出來；經過區域二值化後，再使用連通物件連接法將字元作分割，取得個別字元影像，先做正規化處理運算，再利用樣板比對法將字元辨識出來。
利用上述方法，我們可以在ARM平台上偵測到車牌並成功切割出字元，在不設限外在環境和影像中車牌位置的情形下，即使原始影像有些許傾斜或有不同強度光線照射，經實驗證實，我們可以得到約95.45%的成功偵測率。如果在既定條件下，距離車體1~3公尺、俯角25~35度、車牌傾斜不超過10度、車牌無明顯髒汙毀損，我們可以百分之百地成功擷取出車牌而字元切割成功率也達到97.73%；單一字元辨識率則有94.05%，若在字元乾淨且車牌無變形的情況下，我們亦可百分之百的辨識出個別字元。

A license plate recognition system is composed of three processing modules: license plate detection, character segmentation, and character recognition. This paper presents a method of vehicle license plate image detection based on wavelet transform, character segmentation using connected components labeling, and recognition based on template matching.
The proposed system consists of four main stages. First, we convert images to 8-bit grayscale and adjust the images to proper size. And then, a wavelet transform based method is used to get important contrast features as guides to search for desired license plates. Second, finding a reference line in LH sub-image plays an important role to locate the desired license plate region. According to the reference line we can decrease the searching region of license plate and speed up the execution time. Third, we binarize our image by using Otsu algorithm. After that, we use 4-connected components labeling algorithm to segment characters of the license plates. Forth, we normalize the size of the segmented characters and recognize characters using template matching method.
Since the feature extracted is robust to complex backgrounds. The major advantage of the proposed method is that it works well in extracting differently illuminated and oriented license plates.
We experiment with about one hundred vehicle images obtained from basement parking area. The average accuracy of detection is 95.45% and the average accuracy of segmentation is 96.59%. When we take the pictures with angle of depression 25~35 degrees and 1~3 meter away from the vehicle without any shelters or dust on the license plates, we will receive 100% accuracy of the detection and segmentation result. However, the license plate can not slope over 10 degrees. The average recognition result is 94.05%.

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