Vehicle plate number localization using a modified GrabCut algorithm

Vehicle plate number recognition plays an important role in traffic control and surveillance systems. A key stage in any vehicle plate number recognition system is to first locate the vehicle plate number. In this paper, we present a modified GrabCut algorithm for localizing vehicle plate numbers. In contrast with the traditional interactive GrabCut technique, a modified GrabCut algorithm was designed to identify and extract vehicle plate numbers in a completely automatic manner. Our approach extends the use of the traditional GrabCut algorithm with addition of a feature extraction method which uses geometric information to give accurate foreground extraction. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, the localization accuracy is tested with a dataset of 500 vehicle images with vehicle plates from different countries. An accuracy of 99.8% was achieved for the localization of vehicle plates. Comparative analysis is also reported.