openalpr

OpenALPR is an open source Automatic License Plate Recognition library written in C++ with bindings in C#, Java, and Python. The library analyzes images and identifies license plates. The output is the text representation of any license plate characters found in the image.

Check out a live online demo here: http://www.openalpr.com/demo.html

User Guide

OpenALPR includes a command line utility. Simply typing "alpr [image file path]" is enough to get started recognizing license plate images.

For example, the following output is created by analyzing this image:

user@linux:~/openalpr$ alpr ./samplecar.png

plate0: top 10 results -- Processing Time = 58.1879ms.
    - PE3R2X     confidence: 88.9371
    - PE32X      confidence: 78.1385
    - PE3R2      confidence: 77.5444
    - PE3R2Y     confidence: 76.1448
    - P63R2X     confidence: 72.9016
    - FE3R2X     confidence: 72.1147
    - PE32       confidence: 66.7458
    - PE32Y      confidence: 65.3462
    - P632X      confidence: 62.1031
    - P63R2      confidence: 61.5089

Detailed command line usage:

user@linux:~/openalpr$ alpr --help

USAGE: 

   alpr  [-c <country_code>] [--config <config_file>] [-n <topN>] [--seek
         <integer_ms>] [-p <pattern code>] [--clock] [-d] [-j] [--]
         [--version] [-h] <image_file_path>


Where: 

   -c <country_code>,  --country <country_code>
     Country code to identify (either us for USA or eu for Europe). 
     Default=us

   --config <config_file>
     Path to the openalpr.conf file

   -n <topN>,  --topn <topN>
     Max number of possible plate numbers to return.  Default=10

   --seek <integer_ms>
     Seek to the specied millisecond in a video file. Default=0

   -p <pattern code>,  --pattern <pattern code>
     Attempt to match the plate number against a plate pattern (e.g., md
     for Maryland, ca for California)

   --clock
     Measure/print the total time to process image and all plates. 
     Default=off

   -d,  --detect_region
     Attempt to detect the region of the plate image.  [Experimental] 
     Default=off

   -j,  --json
     Output recognition results in JSON format.  Default=off

   --,  --ignore_rest
     Ignores the rest of the labeled arguments following this flag.

   --version
     Displays version information and exits.

   -h,  --help
     Displays usage information and exits.

   <image_file_path>
     Image containing license plates


   OpenAlpr Command Line Utility

Binaries

Pre-compiled binaries are located here: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/releases

These are typically built with each new release.

Install OpenALPR on Ubuntu 14.04 x64 with the following commands:

wget -O - http://deb.openalpr.com/openalpr.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://deb.openalpr.com/master/ openalpr main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openalpr.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openalpr openalpr-daemon openalpr-utils libopenalpr-dev

Compiling

OpenALPR compiles and runs on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

OpenALPR requires the following additional libraries:

- Tesseract OCR v3.0.3 (https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/)
- OpenCV v2.4.8+ (http://opencv.org/)

After cloning this GitHub repository, you should download and extract Tesseract and OpenCV source code into their own directories. Compile both libraries.

Please follow these detailed compilation guides for your respective operating system:

• [Windows] (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/wiki/Compilation-instructions-(Windows))
• [Ubuntu Linux] (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr/wiki/Compilation-instructions-(Ubuntu-Linux))
• [Android] (https://github.com/sujaybhowmick/OpenAlprDroidApp)
• [iOS] (https://github.com/twelve17/openalpr-ios)

If all went well, there should be an executable named alpr along with libopenalpr-static.a and libopenalpr.so that can be linked into your project.

Docker

# Build docker image
docker build -t openalpr https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr.git
# Download test image
wget http://plates.openalpr.com/h786poj.jpg
# Run alpr on image
docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data:ro openalpr -c eu h786poj.jpg

Questions

Please post questions or comments to the Google group list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openalpr

Contributions

Improvements to the OpenALPR library are always welcome. Please review the OpenALPR design description and get started.

Code contributions are not the only way to help out. Do you have a large library of license plate images? If so, please upload your data to the anonymous FTP located at upload.openalpr.com. Do you have time to "tag" plate images in an input image or help in other ways? Please let everyone know by posting a note in the forum.

Donations

OpenALPR provides bounties for open issues. Other developers can fix/enhance the library and claim those bounties. The best way to donate to the project is to add a bounty to one or more of the open issues on BountyShare

License

Affero GPLv3 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html