Solution:

This is an important stage in vehicle license plate detection in the location of the license plate. The license plate area contains a good amount of edge and texture information.

The license plate of the vehicle consists of several characters and hence contains rich edge information.

At times, the background of the vehicle image also contains much edge information. The interesting fact is that the background areas around the license plate mainly include some horizontal edges whereas the edges in the background mainly contain long curves and random noises.

Also, the edges in the plate area cluster together and produce intense texture features.

If only the vertical edges are extracted from the vehicle image and most of the background, edges are removed, then the plate area will be isolated distinctly.

The algorithm proposed in the present work contains four parts: image enhancement, vertical edge extraction, background curve, and noise removal.

shows the effect on vision due to various tinting levels applied to windows and the corresponding darkness value. From Figure 1.9, we could clearly see that when the VTL value is less than 35%, it is very difficult to see the objects/persons present inside the vehicle.

Due to this reason, many law enforcement authorities in various states/countries insist that the threshold value of VTL should be 35% or more.

shows the design of the controller module for further processing. The vehicle under surveillance is tested for windshield/window tinting level.

If the tinting level is up to the the desired level, then the testing is continued for the next vehicle; otherwise, for the same vehicle, we switch to the number plate identification module.

After identifying the “vehicle number” of the vehicle, the GPS data or location ID, time, and date along with the proof of tinting level (processed image) are sent from the client system (surveillance camera system) to the server.

The server checks the vehicle registration number in its database and locates the owner’s contact details and accordingly issue a ticket to the owner of the vehicle.