License Plate Recognition with OpenCV and Tesseract OCR

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is a powerful tool in computer vision, used in applications like automated toll collection, traffic monitoring, and security surveillance. This blog post will walk you through building an LPR system using Python, OpenCV, and Tesseract OCR. Don’t worry if you’re new to these technologies; each step is broken down to ensure clarity and ease of understanding.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need basic Python knowledge. You’ll install necessary libraries, work with image processing using OpenCV, and use Tesseract OCR to extract text from the images.

Required Libraries

pip install opencv-python-headless opencv-python opencv-contrib-python pytesseract ipywidgets matplotlib seaborn

Project Overview

We’ll be using OpenCV to process images of license plates, detect the license plate region, and then extract text from it using Tesseract OCR. The project follows these main steps:

1. Load an image of a vehicle’s license plate.
2. Preprocess the image (grayscale conversion, blurring, edge detection).
3. Detect the license plate region.
4. Extract the text from…