Ching Suen
Director, Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Title: Enormous Varieties of Font Data for the License Plates of Automobiles
Biography
Biography: Ching Suen
Abstract
License plates contain the alphanumeric identity numbers of automobiles. These numbers provide pertinent information about the cars and their owners. They can be detected by radar or by canners to check for speeding and thefts, etc. They are also important to security because they can help the police to identify a vehicle. However, some alphanumeric characters may not be easily read when the cars are moving or at a distance. As we march towards the modern age of having driverless cars on the roads, it is imperative that the license plates of vehicles can be read correctly by the human eyes as much as by intelligent machines. With that goal in mind, we started our research by studying the fonts of the current license plates to determine their legibility and suitability. We began by examining the regulations governing the designs of these alphanumeric numbers as published in government documents. Since then, we have also conducted an extensive survey and collected big data on the formats and fonts used in the license
plates of many countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. We have found that quite a few of the alphanumeric characters are susceptible to errors leading to the wrong reading of their identity. Typical examples include confusions between numerals 5 and 6, between B and 8, G and 6, D and 0, I and 1, K and X, Q and 0, V and Y, and Z and 2. Having identified the
confusing characters, we designed a new font with appropriate openings of the counters, X-heights, slants, distinctive features, angles and lengths of certain strokes and overhangs. Our new font has been judged to be more legible than all the designs found in our survey. This presentation will include the following findings:
1) The big font data used in the license plates found in different countries on several continents,
2) The design of our new font aiming at high legibility,
3) A subjective experiment comparing the legibility of our new font with the current fonts found on current license plates in different regions around the globe, based on computer simulation of moving vehicles.