Identifying the license plate

In this project, we are going to detect and read license plates in photos of cars. We will be performing multiple steps, from locating the license plate to displaying the characters in the located license plate.

Let's refer to the code in Jupyter Notebook needed to analyze our sample images:

%pylab notebook
figure()
imshow(imread('tests/p1.jpg'))

We get the following photo when we run the code:

We have a photo of a car, with its license plate clearly visible and readable. The challenge is to locate the license plate, isolate it from the rest of the photo, and extract the characters from it.

We can now take a closer look at the license plate using the available utility functions:

There are many algorithms that can help us carry out both these tasks. For example, object detectors such as YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection can do a very...