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APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR RECOGNIZING THE STATE OF ORIGIN OF A VEHICLE LICENSE PLATE

  • US 20080285804A1
  • Filed: 05/14/2008
  • Published: 11/20/2008
  • Est. Priority Date: 05/14/2007
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. An apparatus for extracting information from a vehicle license plate, comprising:

  • one or more imaging devices for acquiring one or more images that include the vehicle license plate, where the one or more images include color information;

    a license plate detection module for detecting a vehicle license plate image portion within the one or more images;

    a license plate characteristic database for storing license plate characteristics of license plates issued by a plurality of state governments;

    an origin determination module for determining a plurality of license plate characteristics found in the vehicle license plate image portion, for comparing the license plate characteristics found in the vehicle license plate image portion to license plate characteristics stored in the license plate characteristic database, for determining based on the comparison one or more candidate state governments from which the vehicle license plate may have issued, for selecting, based at least in part on the color information in the one or more images, at least one of the candidate state governments as the state government that issued the license plate, and for generating state issue information based on the selection;

    an optical character recognition engine for determining alphanumeric characters from the license plate image portion; and

    an output device for outputting the alphanumeric characters and the state issue information.

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