Edge detection comparison for license plate detection

The detection of license plate region is the most important part of a vehicle's license plate recognition process followed by plate segmentation and optical character recognition. Edge detection is commonly used in license plate detection as a preprocessing technique. This paper compares the performance of the image enhancement filters when used in edge detection algorithms combined with connected component analysis to extract license plate region. The experimental comparison of Canny, Kirsch, Rothwell, Sobel, Laplace and SUSAN edge detectors on gray scale images shows that Canny yields high plate detection of 98.2% tested on 45,032 UK images containing license plates at 720×288 resolution captured under various illumination conditions. The average processing time of one image is 56.4 ms.