Efficient and fault tolerant license plate matching method

A non-transitory computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing steps, said steps comprising:

• identifying a target plate comprising a first set of characters and a candidate plate comprising a second set of characters;
• generating a set of sub-plates by adding or subtracting at least one character from the second set of characters;
• computing a matching score between said candidate plate and said target plate;
• computing a matching score between each of said sub-plates and said target plate;
• and
• computing a maximum for each of said matching scores in order to thereafter normalize said maximum to obtain a final matching score for each of said matching scores.

A system for identifying a matching license plate, said system comprising:

• an image capture device;
• a central processing unit operably connected to a database;
• and
• a non-transitory computer-usable medium embodying computer code, said non-transitory computer-usable medium being coupled to said data bus, said computer program code comprising instructions executable by said processor and configured for:
• identifying a target plate comprising a first set of characters and a candidate plate comprising a second set of characters;
• generating a set of sub-plates by adding or subtracting at least one character from the second set of characters;
• computing a matching score between said candidate plate and said target plate;
• computing a matching score between each of said sub-plates and said target plate;
• and
• computing a maximum for each of said matching scores in order to thereafter normalize said maximum to obtain a final matching score for each of said matching.