License plate localisation based on morphological operations

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems allow users to track, identify and monitor moving vehicles by automatically extracting their number plates. This paper presents an improved method to locate car plates in an ANPR system. The proposed method is based on morphological open and close operations where different Structuring Elements (SE) are used to maximally eliminate non-plate region and enhance plate region. This method has been tested using a database of UK number plates and results achieved have shown significant improvements in terms of the detection rate compare to other existing plate localisation systems.