I have a web site that allows users to upload images of cars and I would like to put a privacy filter in place to detect registration plates on the vehicle and blur them.
The blurring is not a problem but is there a library or component (open source preferred) that will help with finding a licence within a photo?
Caveats;
This question is related to
image
ocr
computer-vision
anpr
try this Simple Automatic Number Plate Recognition System
Open source and written with C#
I came across this one that is written in java javaANPR, I am looking for a c# library as well.
I would like a system where I can point a video camera at some sailing boats, all of which have large, identifiable numbers on them, and have it identify the boats and send a tweet when they sail past a video camera.
High performance ANPR Library - http://www.dtksoft.com/dtkanpr.php. This is commercial, but they provide trial key.
http://licenseplate.sourceforge.net Python (I have not tested it)
The blurring is not a problem but is there a library or component (open source preferred) that will help with finding a licence within a photo?
Ans: The CARMEN FreeFlow ANPR Software engine (Commerical)
Yes I use gocr at http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ its a commandline application which you could execute from your application. I use it in a couple of my applications.
It maybe work looking at Character recoqnition software as there are many libraries out there that perform the same thing. I reading an image and storing it. Micrsoft office is able to read tiff files and return alphanumerics
Have a look at Java ANPR. Free license plate recognition...
There is a new, open source library on GitHub that does ANPR for US and European plates. It looks pretty accurate and it should do exactly what you need (recognize the plate regions). Here is the GitHub project: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
EDIT: I wrote a Python script for this.
As your objective is blurring (for privacy protection), you basically need a high recall detector as a first step. Here's how to go about doing this. The included code hints use OpenCV with Python.
Apply Gaussian Blur.
img = cv2.imread('input.jpg',1)
img_gray = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
img_gray = cv2.GaussianBlur(img_gray, (5,5), 0)
Let the input image be the following.
Threshold the resultant image using strict threshold or OTSU's binarization.
cv2.Sobel(image, -1, 1, 0)
cv2.threshold()
Apply a Morphological Closing operation using suitable structuring element. (I used 16x4 as structuring element)
se = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT,(16,4))
cv2.morphologyEx(image, cv2.MORPH_CLOSE, se)
Resultant Image after Step 5.
Find external contours of this image.
cv2.findContours(image, cv2.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv2.CHAIN_APPROX_NONE)
For each contour, find the minAreaRect()
bounding it.
All minAreaRect()
s are shown in orange and the one which satisfies our criteria is in green.
You can apply other filters you deem suitable to increase recall and precision. The detection can also be trained using HOG+SVM to increase precision.
I have done some googling about this a couple of months ago. There are quite a few papers about this topic, but I never found any concrete open-source implementation. There are a lot of commercial implementations though, but none of them with a price quote, so they're probably pretty expensive.
Source: Stackoverflow.com