VEHICLE SPEED DETECTION AND LICENSE PLATE RECOGNITION

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

1.1 General Introduction
Over speeding vehicles are major issues for road safety and needs proper addressing to minimize the accidents. Excessive Speed is a factor in one third of all fatal crashes.
Vehicle speed detection is based on the use of Dopplar Radar to find the speed of the moving vehicles. Dopplar effect can be exploited to measure the speed of vehicles and identify those crossing speed limit. The shift in frequency between the transmitted and reflected high frequency wave is the key factor used to calculate speed. The dopplar radar based speed detector can be interfaced to a microprocessor based system for measurement and comparison. HD camera attached to the system can be used to provide a real time view of the road. The system can be connected to the server via internet and the images from the road can be transmitted to the server for processing.
Automatic number plate recognition is an image processing technology that uses number plate to identify the vehicle. The objective is to isolate the number plate of the vehicle from the image and use optical character recognition to identify the characters of the number plate. Moreover, the digitize number plate will be transmitted to the next station where it will be displayed in LCD panel.

1.2 National statistical trends in road accident
Road accidents are increasing in Nigeria due to increased vehicle speed. This has become a serious problem which killed more than 1734 people’s life and injury of more than 11000 people in year 2009/10. The estimated annual national loss from road accidents is more than N90 million. Considering the heavy loss of lives and wealth in road accidents the concerned road and traffic management agencies have started to incorporate road safety issues in their program but it seems inadequate as the losses of life and property from road accidents is increasing. Trend of road accidents and losses of life and property is increasing in recent year. However, the figures do not give the full accident picture. Experience shows that a fairly large number of accidents are never reported to the police, mainly because the involved parties want to settle the matter between them. This under-representation is assumed to be less pronounced for severe accidents.
Various causes of road accidents show drivers negligence 3,037 times, passengers negligence 18 times, overtake 100, speed 386, drink driving 208, technical problem 295, animals 1, road condition 9, weather condition 1 and other problems 3.
1.3 Statement of problem
Number of ways are being implemented to check and identify the over speeding vehicle. But no automatic system has been developed so far that can perform the task of speed detection and vehicle identification without human assistance. The major issues seen at the present context are:
Road accidents are increasing day by day with prime cause being the over speeding of the vehicle.
The use of human resources to check this issue can be very tedious and time consuming and sometimes become irrelevant.

1.4 Objectives
The objective of our project is to address the issues discussed above. The objectives are as follows:
To design an automatic and versatile system that addresses the issues of over speeding without use of human resources.
To detect the speed of the over speeding vehicle and digitize number plate using image processing.
To establish the networking between different systems to exchange the information among them.

1.5 Scope
Road safety: The timely checking of the over speeding vehicle will reduce high percentage of road accidents.
Automation in law enforcement: The system being completely automatic reduces the number of traffic police officers needed to deploy in the real field for checking speeding vehicles.
With very few enhancements in the proposed system new features can be easily incorporated such as:
Vehicle security: The lost out cases of the vehicle are increasing day by day, the stolen vehicle can be easily detected by comparing with the registered entry of stolen vehicles.
Parking: The vehicles can be easily registered using automatic system with this system in the parking lounge or similar purpose complexes.
Visitor management: This system can be effectively used to assist visitor management systems in recognizing guest vehicles.