Technology in the policing field has revolutionized the way police officers go about their job on a daily bases. It is constantly changing for both the good and the bad, and helps to create a safer and better environment for citizens to live in. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) is just one of the many technologies that have been discovered, and put into place throughout the policing community. Automatic Number Plate Recognition is means of surveillance that uses optical character recognition on various images and makes reading license plate numbers possible. They do this through the use of existing closed-circuit television, road enforcement cameras, or ones specifically designed for the task. This technology has been …show more content…

When pictures are taken it is never a perfect picture. The angle is never spot-on and is often skewed up, down, left, right, or can be altered by various weather including rain, fog, and snow. Algorithms help to correct these alterations. The software is based upon six major algorithms that help to insure that license plates can be scanned both accurately and efficiently. The first of the algorithms is Plate Localization which its job is to find the plate and isolate it in the image that the camera took. Next is Plate Orientation and Sizing which takes the skew of the image into consideration and adjusts the various dimensions of the picture to meet the required size that the software is based on. In order to get the image to meet certain brightness and contrast requirements, the third algorithm Normalization is used. During this part of the process some systems use edge detection techniques to better show the difference between the letters and the background of the plate, and another technique that is being is median filter which helps to reduce the visual noise within the picture to improve clarity. The fourth algorithm Character Segmentation breaks down the image of the license plate individually by each character. Optical Character Recognition is the fifth algorithm which simply acknowledges each