Localization of License Plates From Indian Vehicle Images Using Iterative Edge Map Generation Technique

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617
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Localization of License Plates from Indian Vehicle
Images Using Iterative Edge Map Generation
Technique
Satadal Saha, Subhadip Basu, Mita Nasipuri and Dipak Kr. Basu
Abstract During the last decade or so Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system has been evolved as an important area of
research due to its potential use in various traffic monitoring and traffic control applications. For any ALPR system, among the three major
components, such as license plate localization, character segmentation and character recognition, the first one i.e. localization of potential
license plate regions within an image is considered to be the most important and challenging task so far as real life sceario is concerned.
The problem becomes more challenging in the Indian context, especially because of the non-standardization of license plate characteristics
thereby resulting wide variations of features of the license plate and the characters therein. The degraded quality of license plates, dusty
nature of air, wind turbulence and fast changing weather condition further complicate the localization of license plate from the video
snapshots of the on-road vehicles. In the present work, an effective edge based technique has been developed for localization of license
plate boundary for different binarization thresholds, followed by vertical edge gradients of the characters therein and then a confidence
measure is estimated for localization of license plate. A segment analysis engine is designed to identify relevant license plate regions from
the edge map images. The the work is carried out over two metro cities in India to generate 2500 ground-truth images as a whole. The
overall accuracy of license plate localization for the current system is 91%.
Index Terms Binarization, Connected Component Labeling, Sobels edge operator, Histogram Equalization, Probabilistic Localization
Confidence.

1 INTRODUCTION
utomatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) from natural
scene images containing vehicles has long been an inter-
esting area of research because of its potential use in dif-
ferent traffic monitoring and traffic control systems adminis-
tered by government traffic monitoring authority. It has also
other commercial applications in registering vehicles in toll
plaza, super market and car parking in railway and airport
premises. The ultimate objective of any ALPR system is to lo-
calize the license plate region(s) from the vehicle images cap-
tured through road-side cameras and interpret them using an
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. Localization of
license plate regions from the vehicle images is itself a very
challenging task because of its wide variations in size, shape,
color, texture and spatial orientation or skewness. The non-
standardisation of the scripts of the characters set and size,
shape and color of the license plates further complicate the
problem of recognising the alphanumeric characters accurately.
ALPR system may be of two types: on-line and off-line. In
an on-line ALPR system, localization and recognition of the
license number is done in a real time environment analyzing
the sequence of video frames. On the other hand, in an off-line
ALPR system localization, recognition and further statistical
analysis are done using the captured image dataset. Usually an
ALPR system broadly consists of three main components: li-
cense plate localisation, character segmentation and character
recognition. Out of these, license plate localisation may be con-
sidered as the most important and difficult task, especially in a
real life outdoor environment with complex background.
1.1 A brief review of early works in this domain
For last couple of decades or so researcher have developed and
reported numerous techniques for the purpose of efficient de-
tection of license plate regions from vehicular images with or
without complex background. In [1], the width, height, area
and the aspect ratio are used as parameters in a genetic algo-
rithm based optimisation technique for selecting the license
plate region. The approach is highly dependent on the proper
localization of the plate characters and fails if the image con-
tains almost no edge near the license plate boundary. In anoth-
er approach almost horizontal license plates are localized and
recognized in [2] using artificial neural network. License plate
localization and recognition techniques are developed in [3]
using attributes of the plates and neural network. The tech-
nique then analyses syntax of the recognised characters to get
the correct license plate. The method gives efficient localization
but poor recognition results. In [4], Chang et al. reported loca-
lization and recognition of license number for Taiwan vehicles.
They used very specific background and foreground colors for
different types of vehicles. They have assumed very specific
pattern of the characters and digits within the license plate.
2011 Journal of Computing Press, NY, USA, ISSN 2151-9617
http://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing/
A

- S. Saha is with the Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engg., MCKV
Institute of Engg., Howrah
- S. Basu is with the Dept. of Computer Science and Engg., Jadavpur Uni-
versity, Kolkata
- M. Nasipuri is with the Dept. of Computer Science and Engg., Jadavpur
University, Kolkata
- D. K. Basu is with the Dept. of Computer Science and Engg., Jadavpur
University, Kolkata


Color edge map and HSI components fuzzification are used for
localization of license plate. They reported higher accuracy of
localization of license plate for the image set containing very
closed and focused frontal view of the vehicle and lesser accu-
racy of localization of license plate for vehicle images captured
from natural scene. In [5], mean shift algorithm is used for li-
cense plate localization. The rectangularity attribute, aspect
ratio and edge density are used as feature in Mahalanobis dis-
tance based classifier for detecting the correct license plate. The
method is robust as long as the color of the license plate differs
from the color of the body of the vehicle, at which it adheres to.
In [6], Pan et al. reported a high performance hybrid model
consisting of two stage recognition model using Bays method
for classifier combination and genetic algorithm for parameter
optimization. In [7], David Llorens et al. reported a work on
license plate extraction and recognition for Spanish license
plate number system. The plate region is extracted by binariz-
ing the image four times and for each binarization result, the
connected components are determined and at last they are
combined for all binarization results. Region of interests are
found by proper scoring method. They have assumed that the
license plate width remains within 25% to 75% width of the full
image. They have also rejected some connected components
depending on the width, height and aspect ratio of the compo-
nents. With a limited dataset, they have claimed good localiza-
tion efficiency when applied on test dataset. In [8], Nomura
applied a mathematical morphological approach for degraded
character image segmentation. In the process of segmentation
also they have assumed a composition of three letters and four
digits in the license plate character set. A work on Iranian li-
cense plate localization is done in [9]. It uses Sobels operator to
get the vertical edge image, Otsus method to binarize the im-
age and also some morphological operations for localizing the
license plate. It is a robust method and is rotation/ scale inva-
riant and also applicable to different lighting conditions.
A reference on ALPR of Indian vehicles is found in [10].
However, the technical details and the performance of such
techniques could not be evaluated on real life datasets. In one
of our earlier works [11], a color based segmentation scheme is
implemented for Indian commercial vehicles. In another work
[12], vertical edge density of the characters is used statistically
for localization of license plate. However, both of our earlier
techniques had limited generalization attributes and are appli-
cable to a specific set of vehicles only. An ANN based tech-
nique is reported in [13] with an accuracy of 80%. A more ge-
neralised text segmentation based approach is reported in [14]
which when applied on license plate localization area provides
an efficiency of 88%.
1.2 Motivation behind the current work
The technique for localization of license plate uses the features
of the license plate and/ or the characters therein. As the li-
cense plate and the license number have many features with
huge variation over the globe, the techniques usually lacks in
terms of generality and more specifically they are domain spe-
cific. Moreover the technique behaves efficiently if the features
are more stringent within a specific domain of interest. A re-
view of the techniques described above reveals that the strict
maintenance of the size of the plate, color of the plate, font
face/ size/ color of each character, spacing between subse-
quent characters, the number of lines in the license plate, script
etc. resulted in good efficiency in localization and recognition
of the license plate. Unlike foreign countries, in India the stan-
dards of the license plate are maintained by the State Govern-
ments independently. Due to poor regulatory restrictions in
many states, there lies more variety in the license plates in
terms of size and color of foreground and background, font
and separation of characters and also in number of lines
representing the license number. The noisy/degraded license
plates, air pollution and wind turbulence further complicates
the problem of localization of license plate regions from the
video snapshots of the on-road vehicles. The large diversity of
the attributes of the Indian license plate makes its localization a
challenging problem for the research community. Despite these
challenges, few works have been reported so far on localization
or recognition of the license plates for Indian vehicles.
Because of the complexities in localizing the license plates
for Indian vehicles some new technique needs to be developed
for localizing the license plate in Indian scenario. To address
these challenges the objective of the current paper is to present
a novel technique for automatic localization of license plate not
only to enrich the research output but also to be used in full
fledged commercial environment. As a first step of application
of ALPR system in a particular state government organization,
a technique for identifying the images in which the vehicles
have actually violated the traffic red signal has already been
reported in [15]. In the second step of the ALPR system the
proposed technique can be implemented to localize the license
plate of the vehicles violated the traffic red signal. In the fol-
lowing two sections we discuss the collection of dataset and
the basic methodologies employed for the image preprocess-
ing, segmentation and the localization task. In the subsequent
sectins the experimental results and the conclusions are dis-
cussed.
2 COLLECTION OF DATASET
The image dataset for the current work is obtained from a
project on Automated Red Light Violation Detection system for the
traffic monitoring authorities of two major metro cities in In-
dia. Five important and busy road crossings across the two
cities were selected for collection of the dataset. Multiple sur-
veillance cameras were installed at various heights of around 3
to 8 meters from the road surface at the road crossings to cap-
ture the frontal view of the vehicles. The objective of the sys-
tem was to detect the vehicles violating the stop line at red traf-
fic signal. To serve the purpose, all the surveillance cameras
were synchronized with the traffic signaling system such that
any camera focusing to vehicles in a particular direction cap-
tures the snapshots only when the signal shown to those ve-
hicles is red. All the cameras were focused to the Stop-Line to
capture frontal images of vehicles violating the Stop-Line dur-
ing the RED traffic signal.
The system was run through several days/nights in uncon-
strained outdoor environments with varying lighting condi-
tions, pollution levels and wind turbulences and also it was
run for two seasons: summer and monsoon. More than 30,000
video snapshots were taken and stored as 24-bit color bitmaps
with a frame rate of 25 fps and resolution of 704 576 pixels. A
broad view of the image dataset reveals that the images cap-
tured at mid noon are very much degraded due to over expo-
sure because of the direct sunlight. The license plates of these
images have a washed out appearance and the license number
could not be read out even through naked eye. Moreover it is

also seen from the images that many of them do not contain
any vehicular license plate and some of them contain partial
license plate due to occlusion occurred by other vehicles. Even
some of the vehicles contain broken license plates with incom-
plete license numbers. For the current work, 2500 images with
unique and complete license plate appearing in different orien-
tations in the image frame were selected manually for evaluat-
ing the performance of the developed technique for localiza-
tion of the license plate. Among these images, most are col-
lected from cameras installed to capture multiple vehicle im-
ages (Metro city#1) with complex backgrounds and rest are
focused at individual vehicles (Metro city#2) resulting in larger
license plate regions with simpler background.
3 THE PRESENT WORK
In the current work, we have developed an effective edge
based technique for localization of license plate region from the
captured video snapshots taken by the surveillance cameras in
unconstraint outdoor environment. The overall technique is
applied on preprocessed gray scale images. Different edge map
images are subsequently prepared using different heuristically
chosen thresholds. A rule based segment analysis engine then
identifies relevant connected regions from the binarized image
for true localization of the license plate regions. Fig. 1 shows a
schematic block diagram of the overall process. In the subse-
quent sections the key modules involved in the present work
have been discussed.
3.1 Preprocessing of image
In any 24-bit color image, each pixel contains the Red (R),
Green (G) and Blue (B) color components, each consuming 8
bits of information. From these R, G and B components, 8-bit
gray value for each pixel position is calculated using the for-
mula:
gray(i, j) = 0.59 * R(i, j) + 0. 30 * G(i, j) + 0. 11 * B(i, j) (1)
where, (i, j) indicates the position of a pixel in the image, and
gray(i, j)
e
(0, 255).
The video snapshot are normally affected from a variety of
impairments like lighting condition variation, motion blur,
random noise like salt-and-peeper noise etc. These noises are
removed as far as practicable before execution of the license
plate localization algorithm. Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of
the proposed technique and in the subsequent sub-sections the
preprocessing techniques employed over the images are dis-
cussed.
3.1.1. Median filtering
Median filter is a non-linear filter, which replaces the gray
value of a pixel by the median of the gray values of its neigh-
bors. We have used 3 3 mask to get eight neighbors of a pixel
and their corresponding gray values. The gray value of the
center pixel of the mask is replaced by the median of the gray
values of the pixels within the mask. This operation removes
salt-and-peeper noise from the image.

3.1.2. Histogram equalization
The contrast of the gray scale images are increased by histo-
gram equalization technique. Total 256 gray levels (from 0 to
255) are used for stretching the contrast. Let the total number
of pixels in the image be N and the number of pixels having
gray level k be n
k
. Then the probability of occurrence of gray
level k may be obtained as:

(2)

The stretched gray level (S
k
) is calculated using the cumula-
tive frequency of occurrence of the gray level k in the original
image using the formula:

(3)

where, 255 indicates the maximum gray value in the enhanced
image.

Fig.1 Block diagram of proposed algorithm

3.1.3. Skew correction of image
The frontal plane of the vehicle may not be parallel to the im-
age plane. This makes the license plate skewed with respect to
the horizontal axis of the image. To remove the skew in the
image it is rotated through some angle either clockwise or anti-
clockwise. This makes the stop-line and the license plate hori-
zontal. The degree and the direction of rotation are purely
based on the orientation of the camera with respect to the stop-
line on the road. In the present work, the camera angles are
measured with respect to the stop-line and the images for a
specific camera are rotated through the fixed angle correspond-
ing to the particular camera using the following formula.

n
p
k
k
=

0
2 5 5
k
j
k
j
n
S
N
=
=


(4)

where, any pixel (x, y) is rotated by an angle u to generate a
new set of coordinates (x', y') for the said pixel.
3.2 Edge detection
Sobels edge operator [16] is used in the current work for detec-
tion of edge gradients from the histogram equalized gray scale
images. All the four masks (horizontal, vertical and two di-
agonals) are used for finding the edge gradient. Once the edge
gradients are calculated for each pixel, edge maps are created
by binarizing the edge gradients using different threshold val-
ues within the range (T
s
, T
e
) with a step size of T. The primary
reason behind the choice of different binarization thresholds is
the huge variability in outdoor lighting condition of the cap-
tured images. The edge gradients of the license plate regions
vary widely among the images captured at broad daylight, at
twilight, during raining conditions or at night time.
To eliminate pixel noises (holes or isolated points) in the edge
map, morphological open-close [16] operation is employed on
each edge map. Fig. 3 shows sample edge maps for subsequent
extraction of license plate regions.

(a) Th=20 (b) Th=30
(c) Th=40 (d) Th=50
Fig. 2. Edge maps for different thresholds (Metro city#1)

3.3 Design of the rule based segment analysis engine
The noise free edge maps are used for localizing the license plate.
For this purpose, 8-connected edge components are segmented
and labeled uniquely using a connected component labeling
(CCL) algorithm [16]. Each such connected edge component is
referred to as segment hereafter. It is observed in most of the im-
ages that the license plate regions may be identified as an isolated
segment when edge maps are created with a suitably chosen bina-
rization threshold. Over and above all the segments resulted from
the CCL algorithm may not contain the true license plate regions.
Capitalizing this idea, a rule based segment analysis engine is
developed under the current work for effective selection of poten-
tial license plate regions from the set of segments, using the fol-
lowing features:

y
x
y
x
) cos( ) sin(
) sin( ) cos(
'
'
u u
u u

3.3.1. Area of the segment
The overall area of each segment is an important feature for the
identification of the license plate segments. The segments having
area within a predetermined range (a
min
, a
max
) are only considered
as valid segments for subsequent consideration. All the remaining
segments are considered as noise.

3.3.2. Aspect Ratio of the segment
Another important feature of the license plate segments is the as-
pect ratio. Any single line license plate has a standard aspect ratio
(AR
1
) and any double line license plate also has a different but
specific aspect ratio (AR
2
). If the aspect ratio of any segment does
not lie within a tolerable limit () of the aspect ratio of any li-
cense plate, then it is considered as a noise segment. These seg-
ments are discarded for further processing.

3.3.3. Vertical edge gradient of the segment
If any segment satisfies the requisite attribute for the area and the
aspect ratio, then the vertical edge gradients of the said segment is
analyzed. Using the Sobels edge operator, discussed before,
mean () vertical edge gradient and the standard deviation () for
the same are estimated within each such segment. Since the al-
phanumeric characters, present within the license plates have sig-
nificant vertical edge components, the vertical edge signature
within any segment is considered as an important attribute for the
designed segment analysis engine. The segments having >
th

and >
th
are finally considered as the potential license plate
regions under the current work.
3.4 Confidence estimation for the license plate regions
License plate regions selected for different edge maps are final-
ly considered for estimation of a probabilistic localization con-
fidence measure. If any image region is identified as a potential
license plate region for multiple edge maps then the probabilis-
tic confidence value (P
i
) for the said region is computed as fol-
lows:

(5)

where, P
i

e
(0,1) is the probabilistic confidence function for the
i
th
region R
i
and C
i
estimates the number of times the said re-
gion R
i
is identified as a potential license plate region for the
different edge maps obtained for different binarization thre-
sholds (T
s
, T
e
) with a step size of T.
4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
As discussed in section 2, the vehicle image dataset considered
for the current work consists of 30000 video snapshots col-
lected in two different Metro cities in India. All these images
are captured by traffic surveillance cameras, installed by the
roadside, over day and night at different lighting/ weather
conditions and pollution levels. There are also huge variations
in the nature of the background complexities. The most tricky
decision in the current approach is the choice of appropriate
binarization thresholds for creating the edge maps. This is so
because an incorrect threshold may lead to generation of spu-
rious segments for localization of license plate regions by the
segment analysis engine. Due to huge variation of the image
quality due to outdoor environment condition, a range of bina-
rization thresholds (Ts, Te) with a step size of T (instead of a
single one) is chosen to get effective result. For each such bina-
rization threshold, within the given range, the segment analy-
sis engine identifies potential license plate regions from the
generated segments within the edge maps. In the current work,
the range of binarization thresholds is chosen as (20, 40) with a
step size of 5.
For the rule based segment analysis engine, the acceptable
range of area for the license plates for the images taken in the
Metro city#1, is chosen as (2000, 3000). The same values for
Metro city#2 are chosen as (3500, 14000). The standard aspect
ratio for single line license plate is experimentally chosen as 6
2 and for two-line license plate aspect ratio is experimentally
chosen as 1.25 0.25. For estimation of the vertical edge gra-
dients, the acceptable threshold values for the mean (
th
) and
standard deviation (
th
) are chosen as 40 and 0.3 respectively. It
is evident from the sample images shown (Fig. 3-4), that the
camera parameters vary widely between two installations in
two different cities in India.

(a) (b)
1 +
|
.
|
\
|
A
=
T
T T
C
P
s e
i
i

(c) (d)
(e) (f)
Fig. 3 (a-f). Accurate localization of license plates (Metro city#1)

(a) (b)
(c) (d)

(e) (f)
(g) (h)
Fig. 4 (a-h). Accurate localization of license plates (Metro city#2)

Fig. 3(a-f) shows sample vehicle images in Metro city#1 in
India with accurately localized license plate regions in different
lighting conditions and plate parameters. Fig. 4(a-h) shows the
same for Metro city#2 in India. The technique is also capable of
localizing multiple license plates in a single image frame. For
evaluation of the accuracy of the developed system, overall
confidence value of each license plate region is taken into con-
sideration. By suitably tuning the confidence-acceptance thre-
shold, the true license plate regions are finally selected. Higher
is the value of this threshold, lower is the false-acceptance-rate
(FAR).

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
(e) (f)
Fig. 5(a-f). Localization of license plates with false acceptance (Metro city#1)

(a) (b)
Fig. 6(a-b). Non-localization of license plates (Metro city#1)

For evaluating the localization accuracies, a potential li-
cense plate region is compared to the ground-truth data.
Two different scenarios may arise in such comparisons, viz.
potential selection of the true license plate region and selec-
tion of additional regions surrounding the true license plate.
Fig. 5 (a-f) shows evidences of such scenarios in the current
experiment. In such cases, if the false acceptance/ rejection
regions account for more than 50% area of the ground truth
license plate region, the said selection region is considered
to be incorrect license plate localization. Using such compar-
isons the overall license plate localization accuracy of the
current system is observed around 91%. One of the reasons
behind the relatively low localization accuracy is the poor
quality vehicle images collected from Metro city#1. Most of
such images contain complex backgrounds with hardly leg-
ible plate characters. Fig. 6(a-b) and Fig. 7(a-b) show sample
images of vehicles in Metro city#1 and in Metro city#2 re-
spectively where the current technique fails to localize the
license plate regions. The primary reason behind the failure
in Fig. 6(a) is the absence of significant license plate boun-
dary. In Fig. 6(b) the license plate of the vehicle is partially
obstructed by a motor-cycle. The license plate of the vehicle
in Fig. 7(a) could not be localized by the current technique
because of the very closely spaced and italic characters
therein. The main reason for non-localization of license plate
in the image of Fig. 7(b) is the non-separable appearance of
the steel buffer of the vehicle just above the license plate.


(a) (b)
Fig. 7(a-b). Non-localization of license plates (Metro city#2)

Table 1. A comparative analysis of different vehicle license plate localization techniques

Reference citation Domain of Application Methodology Used Accuracy Claimed
[4]
Chang et al. (2004)
Localization and recognition of
license number for Taiwan vehicles
Color edge map and HSI components
fuzzification for localization of license
plate
Localization accuracy of 98.8% for
very closed and focused frontal
view of the vehicle license plate.
Localization accuracy of 96.7% for
vehicle images captured from natu-
ral scene
[6]
Pan et al. (2005)
Not reported Hybrid model consisting of two stage
recognition model using Bays method
for classifier combination and genetic
algorithm for parameter optimization
High performance claimed
[7]
Llorens et al. (2005)
License plate extraction and recog-
nition for Spanish license plate
number system
Plate region extracted by binarizing the
image four times and for each binariza-
tion result the connected components
are determined and at last they are com-
bined for all binarization results. Region
of interests are found by proper scoring
method
Claimed good localization efficiency
when applied on test dataset
[8]
Nomura et al. (2005)
Degraded character image segmen-
tation
Applied mathematical morphological
approach
No localization done
[9]
Mahini et al. (2006)
Iranian LP localization

Sobels vertical mask
Otsu threshold
Morphological operations
Applied on 269 images and
achieved an accuracy of 96.5%
[11]
Saha et al. (2009)
License plate localization for Indian
commercial vehicles
Color based segmentation followed by
filtering of plates depending on the
aspect ratio, area and average horizontal
contrast density
[12]
Saha et al. (2009)
vehicles
Localization based on vertical edge gra-
dient of license plate characters and
followed by filtering based on accepted
tolerance of standard deviation of posi-
tions of the vertical edges
[13]
Saha et al. (2010)
vehicles
Character feature extraction and imple-
mentation of ANN to localize the fore-
ground characters within license plate
achieved an accuracy of 80%
[14]
Saha et al. (2010)
Text segmentation in case of docu-
ment images, business card images
and surveillance camera images
taking snap shots of vehicles from
natural scene in Indian context.
Word segmentation using Hough trans-
form applied over edge image.
Applied on 50 images and achieved
an accuracy of 88%

Table 1 gives a comparison of performances between differ-
ent state-of-the-art techniques related to ALPR. It is evident
from the table that the accuracy of the current work is not di-
rectly comparable with most others, applied in different cities
of the world. However, the current work improves the experi-
mental datasets and the localizations accuracies of our pre-
viously reported techniques in this domain. The technique can
further be enhanced by incorporating shape based fuzzy fea-
tures for localization of the license plate regions. This may be a
possible future direction for the current work discussed in this
paper.
5 CONCLUSION
Analyzing the previous section it has become evident that
the proposed technique localizes vehicle license plates from
outdoor video-snapshots with reasonably good accuracy.
Though the accuracy seems to be not too high in comparison to
many commercial systems available/implemented worldwide,
especially in developed countries, but keeping in mind the na-
ture of complexity of Indian vehicle license plates, the same
may be considered to be well acceptable. The key contribution
lies in variation of binarization thresholds and estima-
tion/aggregation of localization confidence through the itera-
tive procedure. This technique provides an additional edge by
addressing wide variations in outdoor lighting conditions over
days and nights. Also the utilization of the vertical edge based
features enables effective localization of license plate regions
with irregularly shaped plate boundaries. This in turn reduces
false acceptance of plate regions having character like false
components in it. The drawback of this technique is however
visible in some of the test images with prominent vertical edge
components in some non-plate regions of the images, shown in
Fig. 5(a-d). The developed technique may be seamlessly im-
plemented to different cities with wide variations in camera
position, angles etc. with customizable tuning parameters. The
future scope of the current work is to segment the license plate
into constituent characters and subsequently recognize them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Authors are thankful to the CMATER and the SRUVM project,
C.S.E. Department, Jadavpur University, for providing neces-
sary infrastructural facilities during the progress of the work.
One of the authors, Mr. S. Saha, is thankful to the authorities of
MCKV Institute of Engineering for kindly permitting him to
carry on the research work.
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Satadal Saha has done B. Sc. (Physics Hons), completed B. Tech. in
Applied Physics and M. Tech. in Optics and Optoelectronics from Universi-
ty of Calcutta in 1995, 1998 and 2000 respectively. In 2000, he joined as a
Project Fellow in the Department of CST in BESU (formerly B. E. College),
Howrah. In 2001, he joined as a Lecturer in the Department of Information
Technology, Govt. College of Engg. and Textile Technology (formerly
known as College of Textile Technology), Serampore. In 2004, he joined as
a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engg., MCKV Insti-
tute of Engg, Howrah and he is continuing his service there as an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication. He has
authored a book titled Computer Network published by Dhanpat Rai and
Co. Ltd., New Delhi in 2008. His research areas of interest are image
processing and pattern recognition. Mr. Saha is a member of IEEE, IETE
and CSI. He was also a member of the executive committee of IETE, Kol-
kata for the session 2006-08.

Subhadip Basu received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engi-
neering from Kuvempu University, Karnataka, India, in 1999. He received
his Ph.D. (Engg.) degree thereafter from Jadavpur University (J.U.) in
2006. He joined J.U. as a senior lecturer in 2006 and he is continuing his
service there as an Assistant Professor. Currently, he is the visiting Scien-
tist (Under BOYSCAST Fellowship from Govt. of India) at Department of
ECE, The University of Iowa, USA. His areas of current research interest
are OCR of handwritten text, gesture recognition, real-time image
processing.

Mita Nasipuri is a senior member of the IEEE, U.S.A., Fellow of I.E (India)
and W.B.A.S.T, Kolkata, India.

Dipak Kumar Basu He is a senior member of the IEEE, U.S.A., Fellow of
I.E. (India) and W.B.A.S.T., Kolkata, India and a former Fellow, Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

Localization of License Plates From Indian Vehicle Images Using Iterative Edge Map Generation Technique

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2011, ISSN 2151-9617

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