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.

1 - 8 . (canceled) 
     
     
         9 . A system comprising:
 a storage system; and   a car-plate detection system that identifies car plates from one or more images captured by a camera, and utilizes a scan-lines feature vector in a region of consideration in combination with an empirical rule or an automatic classification system.   
     
     
         10 . The system of  claim 9 , wherein the scan-lines feature vector is computed by considering several virtual lines of 1-pixel thickness that intersect a binary form of the region of consideration at different heights;
 wherein said system records the number of pixels that each scan line meets in each track throughout the region; and   wherein said system produces a feature vector which contains the ID of each scan-line and the number of pixels that this line intersects in the region of classification.   
     
     
         11 . A method comprising:
 receiving one or more images from a camera;   identifying car plates from the one or more images captured by the camera; and   utilizing a scan-lines feature vector in a region of consideration in combination with an empirical rule or an automatic classification system.   
     
     
         12 . The method of  claim 11 , wherein the scan-lines feature vector is computed by considering several virtual lines of 1-pixel thickness that intersect a binary form of the region of consideration at different heights;
 wherein said method records the number of pixels that each scan line meets in each track throughout the region; and   wherein said method produces a feature vector which contains the ID of each scan-line and the number of pixels that this line intersects in the region of classification.