System and a method for the detection of multiple number-plates of moving cars in a series of 2-d images

Abstract

A stand-alone computer-camera system capable of extracting car-plate information. This is achieved by using an on-board computer in order to analyze the video stream recorded by the camera sensor, and can be used with any type of camera sensor. The system features specific characteristics making it extremely fast and able to catch plates of cars moving at high-speed. The special algorithms incorporated in this system, are specially implemented, in order to be able to be ported on an embedded computer system, which has usually lower capabilities in terms of processing power and memory than a general-purpose computer.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A system that detects car plates, including a camera, capable of detecting a moving car by analyzing video frames captured by said camera and identifying that portion of at least one video frame that corresponds to the moving car. 
     
     
         2 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the analysis of the at least one video frame identifies a background model. 
     
     
         3 . The system of  claim 2 , wherein the background model is calculated using statistical techniques. 
     
     
         4 . A system to detect car plates, which utilizes video frames captured by a camera, wherein subsets of pixels within one of said video frames are set to one of two values based upon a threshold determined by an automatic binarization technique. 
     
     
         5 . The system of  claim 4 , wherein the automatic binarization technique utilizes a threshold that depends upon the content of at least one of said video frame. 
     
     
         6 . A system, which is capable of identifying car plates from one or more images captured by a camera, that utilizes region classification to determine whether a region within the one or more images is a car plate or is not a car plate; wherein said region classification is based upon pattern recognition with morphological features and wherein said morphological features are calculated in the run-length encoded domain. 
     
     
         7 . The system of  claim 6 , wherein the region classification is based on empirical target rules. 
     
     
         8 . The system of  claim 6 , wherein the region classification is based on empirical target rules and uses an optimal decision fusion rule.