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A Method of Vehicle License Plate De-noising and Location in Low Light Level
Pan Duan and Kaigui Xie
State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment & System Security and New Technology (Chongqing University), China duanpancqu@gmail.com

Na Song and Qichang Duan

College of Automation, Chongqing university, Chongqing, China zuoxiaotingwai@163.com qc_d@sina.com

AbstractLicense plate recognition system (LPRS) is one of the most important parts of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), and the license plate location is the key part of the LPRS, it affects the latter phase of the character segmentation and recognition directly. According to the characteristics of the vehicle license plate which contain the slat and pepper noise in low light level, wavelet transform is adopted to recognize the vehicle license plate in low light level, then the high frequency coefficient based on characteristic of noise is reconstructed, and the softthreshold method is used to do threshold processing of the reconstructed image and obtain the effect of image denoising. Finally, the method of edge detection and projection is used to locate the vehicle license plate area for de-noising vehicle license plate image. The simulation results indicate that the wavelet soft-threshold method can de-noise the low light level image greatly and the method of edge detection with projection can locate the vehicle license plate area fast and accurately. Index Termslow light level, wavelet de-noising, edge detection, vehicle license plate location

I. INTRODUCTION License plate recognition system (LPRS) is one of the most important parts of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), and the license plate location is the key part of the LPRS, it affects the latter part of the character segmentation and recognition directly. On the basis of the characteristics of the license plate, the principle of the f vehicle license plate positioning method is as follows. Based on color and structure of the positioning method, the location of license plate can be determined according to the license plate gray level features, projection features, geometric features and color features. Combined with genetic algorithm, neural network algorithm for license plate location method, those methods are timeconsuming when deal with large license plate image data,
Manuscript received February 1, 2010; accepted March 9, 2010.This work is supported by the State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment & System Security and New Technology (Chongqing University).

so they are not suitable to apply in real-time license plate recognition system. The edge detection algorithm is independent from the clearance of the outer border of the license plate, and could work out efficiently, it is mainly extract the region of rapid change of the gray license plate image, but also has a high sensitivity to some extra edge. In order to get a good positioning effect, the preprocessing of the license plate image is particularly important before location, especially for blurred license plate image preprocessing. Recently, studies on license plate image preprocessing were presented, but fewer are regarding the recognition in the low light level. The low light level is the week visible light at night, such as moonlight, starlight, atmospheric glow and so on. Compared with the image under normal light condition, the low light level image has such characteristics: low signal to noise ratio, low contrast ratio, low spatial resolution, and the visual effect of the image is very blurred, and it is the same to the vehicle license plate image in the low light level. Therefore, how to improve the quality and resolution of the license plate in low light level is a very urgent problem. In this paper, the salt and pepper characteristic of vehicle license plate in low light level is presented, the wavelet transform is used to finish the image de-nosing process, then the method of edge detection and projection is used to deal with the processed image, and finally the accurate location of the vehicle license plate image is obtained. II. THEORY OF WAVELET DE-NOSING Wavelet transform is the improvement and development of the Fourier transform, and it is a timefrequency analysis method which can change both time window and frequency window, and it has higher frequency resolution and lower time resolution in the low-frequency part, and higher time resolution and lower frequency resolution in the high-frequency part. Hence it has a strong capacity of representation of the local features of signal in the time-frequency domain [1].

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Wavelet transform is the result of inner product of the signal and a family of wavelets, given a time-varying signal f(t), it is defined as

+
* f (t ) a ,b (t )dt

Wf (a, b) =

(1)
wavelet domain expression

The kernel function of the transformation is

* ,b (t ) = a 1 a

t b ), a > 0, b R a

(2)
threshold effect

Where a is the scale parameter, b is the translation parameter, and (t ) is called basic wavelet or mother wavelet, which usually is a band-pass function centered t = 0 in a time domain, and has localized or compact support both in time domain and frequency domain, and the mean is zero, that means

Mask effect

(t )dt = 0

(3)
wavelet coefficients reconstruction

Using wavelet transform to de-noise the signal of image, the commonly used method is non-linear filtering method based on discrete wavelet transform. Because of the focus capability, wavelet transform can make the energy of the signal concentrated into a handful of the wavelet coefficients, that is, we can achieve the purpose of de-noising through setting an appropriate threshold on the wavelet coefficients. To choose and determine the threshold function is the key point for the wavelet threshold filtering algorithm. And the threshold function consists of soft threshold, hard threshold, and semi-soft threshold function [2]. Hard threshold method often leads to the filtering result which has a larger variance, the obtained signal contains a number of unexpected oscillation, and is not as smoothness as the original signal. Soft threshold method may result in blurred edges and other distortion phenomenon, but guaranteed to satisfy the optimal estimation of the shrunken qualification, so it ensures the estimated function as smoothness as the original function, and the received estimated signal would not produce additional oscillation while compared with the original signal. Semi-soft threshold method needs to ascertain the two thresholds, and the algorithm is too complex, so we choose the soft threshold method in this paper, and procedures are as follows [3]:
x T T ( x) = x + T 0 if x T if x T if | x | T

Figure.1. Model of wavelet de-noising process

Where f is the original signal without noise, w is noise signal. Signal s could be expressed L in the wavelet domain, namely, the decomposition wavelet coefficients of the signal s in wavelet transform. F is the threshold value operator, which acts on the wavelet coefficients to set the smaller modulus of the coefficients to zero while just leaving the larger modulus of the coefficients. It can be expressed as flows:

( F c )m, n =

cm, n , 0,

cm , n > else

(5)

Mask is mask operator, which acts on the wavelet coefficients to retain the specific coefficients, while sets the else coefficients to zero. It can expressed as flows:

( Mc )m, n =

cm , n , 0,

(c ) Q
m, n

else

(6)

(4)

III. THE WAVELET DE-NOSING FOR VECHILE PLATE IMAGE IN LOW LIGHT LEVEL The use of wavelet de-noising to process the license plate in LLL can be divided into three steps: wavelet decomposition, threshold de-noising, and wavelet reconstruction [4]. Using the wavelet decomposition to the image signal in LLL, the most important point is to choose the appropriate wavelet basis and decomposition level. Considering the rate and effect of the de-noising, we

Where T ( x ) is the result of the threshold processing, T is the threshold value, x is the pre-processed coefficient. The modeling process of wavelet de-noising is as follows:

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selected db4 wavelet to decompose the license plate image in LLL in this paper. The dbN wavelet function is constructed by the worldrenowned wavelet analysis scholar Inrid Daubechies, where N is wavelet level. The support area of the wavelet ( t ) and scale function ( t ) is 2 N 1 .The vanishing moment of ( t ) is N .With the exception of N = 1 , dbN wavelet function not has symmetry property or definite expression. But the square modulus of conversion function h is definited. The characteristics of dbN wavelet function are as follows: 1). It has definite compact support in time domain, namely definite length of ( t ) .Furthermore, its higher

order origin moment of ( t ) .

p = 0 ~ N . The value of N is proportional to length

t ( t )dt
p

equals zero, where

more decomposition level and doing threshold processing for all of the layers of wavelet space coefficients, the more severity of the lost of signal, which will lead to the lower signal to noise ratio compared with the original signal. Hence the computing operation is increased and the processing efficiency is reduced. The less decomposition level, the worse effect of the de-noising result and lower improved of the signal to noise ratio, however, it would not decline the signal to noise ratio. Therefore, combining the actual situation, we choose db4 wavelet decomposition at level 2. To process the license plate image shown in Figure.3 with db4 wavelet decomposition at two levels, we can obtain the result shown in Figure.4. According to figure.4 it can be concluded that db4 wavelet decomposition at level 2 can improve the original image effectively.

2). In time domain, ( ) has N -order zero when

=0.

3). ( ) and its integer displacement is orthogonal ,

namely ( t ) ( t k ) dt = k .

4). ( t ) can be obtained by ( t ) , where ( t ) is low-

pass function with definite length and compact support t = 0 ~ ( 2 N 1) . ( t ) is the shifting weighted sum of

( 2t ) ,

namely

( t ) = g k ( 2t k )
k

where

k = 2 ~ ( 2 N 1) .When N varies, weight g k is different

correspondingly. Since compact support of ( t ) is definite, ( t ) which is obtained by ( t ) has definite compact support correspondingly, and its support area is ( 2 N 1) , which starts at 1 N ends at N . The db4 wavelet function is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3. Original license plate image in LLL

Figure 4. The license plate image decomposed with the db4 wavelet at level 2

Figure 2. The db4 wavelet function

As it is known, the decomposition level affects the result of de-noising greatly. In general, the too much

Figure.5 is the horizontal, diagonal and vertical details of the db4 wavelet decomposition at level 1 and level 2. Selecting the appropriate threshold of wavelet coefficients is the critical work after assurance of the wavelet basis and decomposition level. The principal idea of the threshold function is to remove the smaller factor and shrinking or keeping the larger factor. In this paper,

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L1 Horizontal Details L2 Horizontal Details

L1 Diagonal Details L2 Diagonal Details

L1 Vertical Details L2 Vertical Details Figure 5. The horizontal, diagonal, and vertical details of the db4 wavelet decomposition at level 1 and level 2

we choose the threshold which is just larger than the largest scale of the noise threshold. The Donoho algorithm is adopted to determine the threshold:
T = 2 ln N ,

where N is the signal length. The threshold is shown in Table.I. Then, processing the wavelet coefficients with soft threshold according to equation (4), and we can obtain the de-noising image after reconstruction, which was shown as Figure. 6.
TABLE 1 THE CHIOCE OF THE FILTERING THRESHOLD Level 1 2 Selected Threshold 5.199 18.68 Figure 6. The license plate image after filtered by the wavelet threshold

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IV. THE LICENSE PLATE LOCATION About the license plate location algorithm, the key point is to find some kind of image processing method to make the original image processed by the algorithm is able to show license plate clearly, while reduce or disappear the non-plate region of the image, which accurately and effectively locate the license plate location in the image. The flow chart of license plate location is as follows:

the special luminescent material painted on the license plate, it becomes much more prominent compared with the background, and the edge information is richer relevantly. The task of edge detection is to locate edges precisely and reduce noise effectively. The classical method of edge determination is to examine the change of gray value of each pixel in a neighborhood, and then use the regularity for change of first-order or second-order directional derivative to detect the edge information, that is also called the method of local operator to edge detection. In a image, if a pixel is on the border of an object, its neighborhood would become a change band of gray-scale. The most useful characteristic of this change band is the rate and direction of the gray, and they are presented with magnitude and direction of the gradient vector respectively. Edge detection operator checks each pixel neighborhood and quantifies the change rate of gray, including the determination of the direction. Use the horizontal difference operator on the license plate image to achieve gradient requirements: X = X n X n +1 (7) Accordingly, the two-dimensional graph of the horizontal gradient is: D ( xn , yn ) = S ( xn , yn ) S ( xn +1 , yn ) (8) As a general vehicle license plate contains characters, borders and background, therefore, through using the equation (8) to get the gradient to the image, the edge information will be strengthened. The frequently used detective operator includes Roberts edge operator, Prewitt operator, Sobel operator, and Laplace operator. Roberts edge operator uses local variance to search for edge, and it would locate preciously; Prewitt operator can suppress the noise relatively, but can not eliminate the pseudo-edge completely; Laplace operator is a second order differential operator, it can locate the step-edge point accurately and has a rotation invariance, but easy to lose part of the edge direction information, and poor noise immunity; Sobel operator can extract the edge information and suppress noise effectively, therefore, we select the Sobel operator as the test operator. Sobel operator is the one operator in image processing, which is mainly used for edge detection. Technically, it is a discrete difference operator, for computing the gradient approximation of image brightness function. Using this operator to any point in the image , it will generate a corresponding gradient vector or any other vector. Compared with the other operator, Sobel operator doing weighted for pixel position effect, so its detective result would be better. The operator contains two groups of 33 matrix, called horizontal and vertical matrix. If do the convolution of the two groups of matrix with the image respectively, it can draw horizontal brightness difference approximation and vertical brightness difference approximation. The horizontal operator Sx and vertical operator Sy of the Sobel operator can be respectively expressed as:

Figure 7. Flow chart of license plate location

Recently, there are many different methods to locate the license plate, mainly contained analysis based on the texture feature, methods based on the edge detection, location based on the mathematical morphology, location based on the wavelet analysis, location based on the color image, and so on. After de-noising with wavelet threshold method, the pixel area of the license plate image in LLL occurred a great step change with its surrounding gray scale, that is, the characters and background of the photo area has a clear edge, and there would non-being excessive strong light because of the LLL condition, therefore, in this paper, we choose the license plate location method based on the edge detection.

A. The edge detection Edge is a set of pixels whose surrounding pixel gray has a step change, and it is the basic feature of an image. In the license plate image, there is a large number of information of the edge, while there is much less in the background relatively, especially in the LLL, because of

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1 0 1 1 2 1 sx = 2 0 2 , s y = 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 2 1

Figure.8 is the result of the edge detection with Soble operator for Figure.6, from the image, we can know that edge detection with Sobel operator can filter out unnecessary information effectively and reduce amount of license plate region positioning operation.

the license plate from bottom to up, and consider the first large peak as the horizontal projection area of the license plate, while its starting and ending point as upper and lower boundaries of the license plate. License plate consists 7 characters, so in normal circumstances, there are more than 14 points in each line of the license plate horizontal projection of the edge. According to the experimental result, we choose 15 points, that means if the area was considered as a license plate, each line of its horizontal projection should be within no less than 15 points, and it is also considered as the standard to estimate the starting and ending point of the peak. Than considering the certain height of license plate and according to experimental result, we choose the difference between the ending and starting point of the peak should more than 20, and less than 120 points. Following that, we obtained the upper and lower boundaries of the license plate as shown in Figure.10 .

Figure 8 Edge detective image

B. License Plate Image Location With Projection Method Using the projection method to do horizontal and vertical projection on the binary image to detect the license plate, we can get the license plate image area. The process of projected location is as flows: To accumulate the pixels of the binary image in rows as formula (9):
f r ( x ) = g ( x, y )
y =1 n

Figure 9 Horizontal projection

(9)

Where f r ( x ) is horizontal projection value of the xth row, x is the row number, y is the column number, 1 x m 1 y n n is the width of the image, m is the height of the image. Then to accumulate the pixels of the binary image in columns as formula (10):
f l ( y ) = g ( x, y )
x =1 m

(10)

Where f l ( y ) is vertical projection value of the

yth column, x is the row number,

y is the column
Figure.10 The upper and lower boundaries position

number, 1 x m 1 y n m is the height of the image, n is the width of the image. Horizontal projection: projecting the Figure.8 to y-axis horizontally, it would appear a peak in the horizontal position corresponding to the license plate, as shown in Figure. 9, the peak of the two low points is the upper and lower boundaries of the license plate [5]. As the plate hanging in a lower position of the body, and below it there is no obvious edge-intensive areas, so we can search

Vertical projection: projecting the area in upper and lower boundaries determined with the above method to xaxis vertically, we can obtain the vertical projection of the license plate [6, 9-14]. The license plate area contains seven characters, and there is a certain space between the two characters in the adjacent, so the projected image would appear the peak- valley-peak characteristic, as

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shown in Figure.11. If their interval was less than a empirical value T, the two adjacent area should be combined to carry out some candidate regions. Then according to the fixed percentage of the license plate, we could filter the license plate area form the candidate regions. The effect of the horizontal position and vertical position of license plate is shown in Figure.12.

wavelet threshold de-noising, edge detection and projection method introduced in this paper, we could acquire the perfective location effect of the license plate image in LLL. REFERENCES
[1] Zhou Wei. Wavelet analysis of senior technical with MATLAB [M]. Xi an: Xidian University Press, 2005.12, pp.1 [2] Pan Quan, Zhang Lei, Meng Jin-li, Zhang Hong-cai. Wavelet filtering method and application [M]. Bei Jing: Tsinghua University Press, 2005.9, pp. 8-9 [3] S. G. Chang, B. Yu, M. Vetterli, Adaptive wavelet thresholding for image denoising and compression, IEEE Trans. Image Processing, vol. 9, Sept. 2000, pp. 15321546. [4] Wei Zhang, Fei Yu, Hong-mi Guo, Improved adaptive wavelet threshold for image denoising, 2009 Chinese Control and Decision Conference,2009 [5] Cheng Zhang, Guangmin Sun Deming Chen, Tianxue Zhao, A Rapid Locating Method of Vehicle License Plate Based on Characteristics of Characters Connection and Projection, Second IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics Application, 2007 [6] Danian Zheng,Yannan Zhao, Jiaxin Wang, An efficient method of license plate location,. Pattern Recongnition Letters. 2005, 26 [7] Wang Run-min, Qian Sheng-you. Energy Filter and Wavelet Based License Plate Localization Method, Photoelectron Laser. 2006, 9. [8] Bernsen J. Dynamic thresholding of gray-level images[A]. Proc.8th Int. Conf.on Pattern Recognition[C]. LOSAngeles: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1986, 12511255. [9] Nostu. A Thrshold Selection Method form Gray-level Histograms. IEEE Trans Svst, Man Cvbernet. 1979, SMC9:62-66. [10] Xifan Shi, Weizhong Zhao, and Yonghang Shen.. Automatic license plate recognition system based on color image processing[C].ICCSA 2005, LNCS 3483, 11591168, 2005. [11] Sunghoon Kim, Daechul Kim, Younbok Ryu, and Gyeonghwan Kim. A robust license-plate-extraction method under complex image conditions[C]. 16th international conference on pattern recognition,2002: 176179. [12] Taleb-Ahmed, A.Hamad, D.Tilmant. Vehicle license plate recognition in marketing application Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. IEEE, 9-11 June 2003 90-94. [13] Yanamura Y, Goto M.,Nishiyama D, Soga M, Nakatani H, Saji H. Extraction and tracking of the license plate using Hough transform and voted block matching. IEEE IV2003 Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. 2003: 243-246. [14] Sirithinaphong, T; Chamnongthai, K., Extraction of car license plate using motor vehicle regulation and character pattern recognition, Circuits and Systems, 1998. IEEE APCCAS 1998.

Figure 11 Vertical projection

Figure.12 The vertical position image

V. CONCLUSION The most important pre-processing with the license plate image in LLL is the de-noising process, whose effect would have a direct impact on the subsequent location and identification. This paper take full advantage of the focusing characteristics of wavelet transform and the method of the soft-threshold de-noising of wavelet system in LLL to effectively extract the location of the noise point, which achieved the de-noising purposes and well preserved license plate image details in LLL. At the same time, using the edge detection and projection method, the fast, accurate position for the license plate can be obtained. Using the MATLAB to verify the 200 on-site collective license plate images in LLL with wavelet coefficient soft-threshold de-noising and license plate location, we could obtain the average location-time for each license plate is 1.78 seconds and the location success rate achieves 98%, higher than the average location-time of 3.62 seconds and the accuracy rate of 96.2% in paper [7]. This result showed that by means of

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Pan Duan, male, born in Chongqing, 1985. Now he is a Ph.D student from the State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment & System Security and New Technology (Chongqing University) . His main interest is focus on the intelligent computing and optimization in power system.

Na Song, female, born in Zhoushan, Zhejiang, 1983. College of automation, Chongqing University, master, interested in the research on pattern recognition and intelligent system.

Qi-chang Duan, male, born in Zigong, Sichuan, 1953. College of automation, Chongqing University, PhD student supervisor, interested in the research on application of image recognition and processing, and integrated control and information management functions.

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