A hierarchical license plate recognition system using supervised K-means and support vector machine

In recent years, the use of license plate recognition technology in traffic monitor has attracted a lot of attention because it can be used in a smart city to do criminal investigation and traffic detection. License plate recognition technology has been widely used in parking lot management systems which has fixed shooting angle and lighting environments. The license plate recognition used in traffic monitor will encounter difficulties in character recognition due to factors such as shooting angle, vehicle speed and environment light and shadow. Aiming at the blurred and skewed character images caused by the above factors, this paper presents a hierarchical architecture combining supervised K-means and support vector machine. The supervised K-means is used to classify characters into subgroups. The characters of subgroups can be further classified by support vector machine. The advantage of the proposed approach is to reduce the classes of characters in each subgroup to further reduce the number of SVMs and their complexity, and thus improve the accuracy of character recognition. Experimental results show that our proposed hierarchical architecture achieves an accuracy of 98.89% in character recognition. Compared with the license plate recognition technology using SVM alone, we get a 3.6% improvement in recognition rate.