Technologies and services towards smart-vehicles and Intelligent-Transportation-Systems (ITS), continues to revolutionize many aspects of human life. This paper presents a detailed survey of current techniques and advancements in Automatic-Number-Plate-Recognition (ANPR) systems, with a comprehensive performance comparison of various real-time tested and simulated algorithms, including those involving computer vision (CV). ANPR technology has the ability to detect and recognize vehicles by their number-plates using recognition techniques. Even with the best algorithms, a successful ANPR system deployment may require additional hardware to maximize its accuracy. The number plate condition, non-standardized formats, complex scenes, camera quality, camera mount position, tolerance to distortion, motion-blur, contrast problems, reflections, processing and memory limitations, environmental conditions, indoor/outdoor or day/night shots, software-tools or other hardware-based constraint may undermine its performance. This inconsistency, challenging environments and other complexities make ANPR an interesting field for researchers. The Internet-of-Things is beginning to shape future of many industries and is paving new ways for ITS. ANPR can be well utilized by integrating with RFID-systems, GPS, Android platforms and other similar technologies. Deep-Learning techniques are widely utilized in CV field for better detection rates. This research aims to advance the state-of-knowledge in ITS (ANPR) built on CV algorithms; by citing relevant prior work, analyzing and presenting a survey of extraction, segmentation and recognition techniques whilst providing guidelines on future trends in this area.
Keywords: automatic number plate recognition; computer vision; image processing; intelligent transportation system; machine learning; neural networks; object detection and tracking; recognition; smart vehicle technologies; vehicle identification.