  Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a challenging area of research
due to its importance to variety of commercial applications. The overall
problem may be subdivided into two key modules, firstly, localization of
license plates from vehicle images, and secondly, optical character recognition
of extracted license plates. In the current work, we have concentrated on the
first part of the problem, i.e., localization of license plate regions from
Indian commercial vehicles as a significant step towards development of a
complete ALPR system for Indian vehicles. The technique is based on color based
segmentation of vehicle images and identification of potential license plate
regions. True license plates are finally localized based on four spatial and
horizontal contrast features. The technique successfully localizes the actual
license plates in 73.4% images.
