Vehicle monitoring system

Abstract

The numbers of cars have grown significantly for the past decades in Singapore. Singapore Government foresees that every household will at least own 1 vehicle or more for the next few years.

In Singapore, car park owners installed electronic payment system for car owners to park their vehicles. The purpose of installing such system is to reduce high maintenance cost of rental of buildings.

Electronic Payment System (EPS) does indeed fasten the payment process in recent years but also caused many troubles to car park owners and car owners too. When the whole system went down due to gantry fault, or power failure, car park owners faced a loss in revenue as car owners parked for free during the duration of breakdown. There is no backup system to assist the existing ones.

A backup system such as Car Plate Recognition will be a great help to car park owners. When car enters a particular carpark, a camera will capture the car plate and process some basic data such as character recognition of the car plate, the date and time the car enters. As such, should the existing EPS system go offline, our backup system will replace it

As most of Singapore car plate is similar in terms of font size, color and background, template matching is being researched to implement this system. Some factors which needed to consider while installing this system are the brightness of the environment at the point of entry, and weather it is a day or night time.