Barrier Access Control Using Sensors Platform and Vehicle License Plate Characters Recognition

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 19; no. 13; p. 3015
• Main Authors: Ullah, Farman, Anwar, Hafeez, Shahzadi, Iram, Ur Rehman, Ata, Mehmood, Shizra, Niaz, Sania, Mahmood Awan, Khalid, Khan, Ajmal, Kwak, Daehan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 09-07-2019; MDPI
• Subjects: Access control; Automatic vehicle identification systems; barrier control; features extraction; Fonts; license plate recognition; License plates; machine learning algorithms; Optical character recognition; raspberry-pi; Sensors; sensors platform; vehicle detection; Vehicle identification; vehicle detection; license plate recognition; features extraction; machine learning algorithms; raspberry-pi; barrier control; sensors platform
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s19133015

The paper proposes a sensors platform to control a barrier that is installed for vehicles entrance. This platform is automatized by image-based license plate recognition of the vehicle. However, in situations where standardized license plates are not used, such image-based recognition becomes non-trivial and challenging due to the variations in license plate background, fonts and deformations. The proposed method first detects the approaching vehicle via ultrasonic sensors and, at the same time, captures its image via a camera installed along with the barrier. From this image, the license plate is automatically extracted and further processed to segment the license plate characters. Finally, these characters are recognized with the help of a standard optical character recognition (OCR) pipeline. The evaluation of the proposed system shows an accuracy of 98% for license plates extraction, 96% for character segmentation and 93% for character recognition.