🚗 Vehicle Number Plate Recognition using OpenCV and OCR (Computer Vision)

This project demonstrates an automated system for vehicle number plate recognition using OpenCV for image processing and Tesseract OCR for text extraction. The system detects the number plate from vehicle images, extracts the number, and stores it along with the timestamp into a CSV file.

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🧠 Project Overview

The core functionality of this project is to automatically process an image of a vehicle, detect the number plate, and read the registration number using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The steps followed by the system are:

1. Pre-processing: Resize and convert the image to grayscale to enhance processing.
2. Edge Detection: Use Canny Edge Detection to detect significant edges in the image.
3. Contour Detection: Find contours in the image, focusing on those that match the shape of a number plate (rectangular).
4. OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Extract the text from the detected number plate using Tesseract OCR.
5. Data Saving: Save the recognized number plate along with the timestamp to a CSV file.

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🚀 How to Use the Project

1. Install Dependencies

Before running the script, ensure you have the necessary Python libraries installed. You can install them via pip:

pip install opencv-python pytesseract imutils pandas