Novel and Automatic Parking Inventory System Based on Pattern   Recognition and Directional Chain Code
  The objective of this paper is to design an efficient vehicle license plate recognition System and to implement it for automatic parking inventory system. The system detects the vehicle first and then captures the image of the front view of the vehicle. Vehicle license plate is localized and characters are segmented. For finding the place of plate, a novel and real time method is expressed. A new and robust technique based on directional chain code is used for character recognition. The resulting vehicle number is then compared with the available database of all the vehicles so as to come up with information about the vehicle type and to charge entrance cost accordingly. The system is then allowed to open parking barrier for the vehicle and generate entrance cost receipt. The vehicle information (such as entrance time, date, and cost amount) is also stored in the database to maintain the record. The hardware and software integrated system is implemented and a working prototype model is developed. Under the available database, the average accuracy of locating vehicle license plate obtained 100%. Using 70% samples of character for training, we tested our scheme on whole samples and obtained 100% correct recognition rate. Further we tested our character recognition stage on Persian vehicle data set and we achieved 99% correct recognition. 
Reza Azad, Majid Nazari
cs.CV