关键词: 车牌定位, 边缘检测, 颜色纹理直方图, 支持向量机（SVM）

Abstract: As existing vehicle license plate location algorithms tend to have a lower correctness rate on images with high resolution and complex background, this paper proposes a novel method to vehicle license plate location based on the edge detection and color-texture histogram. The proposed location method is divided into two phases. Firstly, the method extracts the vertical edges in the image by using an improved edge extraction method which combines Canny and Sobel algorithms. Then a filter and projection method is used to locate the potential plate area. To locate the plate precisely, the color-texture histogram feature of the potential region is extracted and matched to the trained classifiers. The experimental results show that, this method has a good robustness against complex backgrounds and uneven light, and can achieve good performance during both day and night.

Key words: vehicle license plate location, edge detection, color-texture histogram, support vector machine (SVM)