System and Method for License Plate Recognition

A method for license plate recognition comprising:

• capturing an image;
• identifying a license plate in the image;
• extracting a sequence of character segments on the license plate;
• computing a probability of each possible character in each character segment;
• identifying permissible characters for the each character segment according to a syntax of the sequence of character segments;
• and
• identifying a character having a highest probability among the permissible characters as a selected character for the each character segment.

A method for extracting character segments on a license plate, comprising:

• cropping a license plate from an image;
• converting the license plate to a grayscale image;
• performing binary thresholding on the grayscale image to generate a binary image;
• performing binary segmentation on the binary image to identify possible character segments;
• assuming a pixel value of characters on the license plate is higher than a pixel value of a background of the license plate, counting a number of possible character segments;
• and
• if the number of possible character segments does not substantially match an expected value, inverting the binary image.