M. K. Jayananda

License plate identification based on image processing techniques

A license plate identification system can be used for numerous applications such as unattended parking lots, security control of restricted areas, traffic law enforcement and automatic toll collection. Such a system captures images of vehicles and identifies license plate numbers automatically. Here we present results of a system in identifying the vehicle license plate through digitized photographic images based on image processing techniques. The developed algorithm is based on two basic processing stages; locating the license plate, and, identifying the individual digits and characters in the license plate. The algorithm takes a raster image of the rear view of a vehicle as input and yields the recognized numbers and characters in the number plate as the output. The performance of the developed algorithm has been tested on a set of real images of vehicles. The first part of the system showed that the algorithm performs quite well in accurately locating the license plates (with 97% efficiency). In the second part which is based on neural network techniques, showed high performance in recognizing digits and characters in located plate regions.

MULTIFRACTAL BEHAVIOR OF WIND SPEED AND WIND DIRECTION

In this paper, an analysis of temporal variation of wind speed and wind direction recorded at 10 min intervals are presented. The measurements were carried out at Hambanthota, a site located in the southern coastal belt of Sri Lanka which has a high potential for wind power generation. The multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to analyze the temporal scaling properties of wind speeds and wind directions. The analysis was carried out for seasonal variation of wind speed and wind direction. It was observed that the scaling behavior of wind speed in Hambanthota is similar to the scaling behavior observed in previous studies which were carried out in other parts of the world. The seasonal wind and wind direction change exhibits different scaling behavior. No difference in scaling behavior was observed with heights. The degree of multifractality is high for wind direction when compared with wind speed for each season.