Efficient Thinning Algorithm for Malaysian Car Plate Character Recognition

The thinning algorithm is one of the approaches of identifying each character printed on the car plate. Malaysian car plate characters appear in different character sizes, styles, customized printed characters etc. These variations contribute to difficulty in thinning successfully segmented and extracted license plate characters for recognition. To address these problems, an improved thinning operation for Malaysian car plate character recognition is proposed. In this algorithm, samples from segmented and extracted license plates are used for a thinning operation which is passed to Zhang-Suen thinning algorithm that could not guarantee one pixel thick and then to single pixelate algorithm that provides one pixel width of character for recognition. From the simulation, the result obtained has clearly proven to be the best for character recognition systems with least number of white pixels (777 pixels) and 0.26% redundant pixel left in the medial curve.