A Brief Summary of my Project

The objective of my final project is to develop intelligent systems capable of processing handwritten vehicle registration marks.

The main techniques used in this project will be on creating neural networks (NNs) to automatically recognize the individual handwritten characters that go to make up a vehicle registration marks and also by using knowledge-based systems (KBSs) to validate the intended registration mark and identify where and when the vehicle was registered.

The first part the project start off by doing a feasibility study of a MLP (multilayer perceptron) and a RBF (Radial Basis Function) networks to see which will contribute to a better performance in recognizing characters. Only the characters A to J were tested at this point of time and low resolution data was used. It was found that RBF is a better network to do the job and it was then use to perform on medium and high resolution data. The result shows that the network performs better on medium resolution data. The network was also used to train and test on a full set of characters (‘0’ to ‘9’, ‘A’ to ‘B’ and ‘space’). The last part on neural network is to use a Hopfield network to recognize characters. It was found that out of ten test patterns there were nine correct outputs.

The second part involves the investigation of a knowledge-based system. First, a rule-based program was written to validate the format of the vehicle registration marks using flex. If users enter an invalid mark, a message will be printed out in the console to tell the users that they have entered an invalid mark. The program continues to be written for interpreting the local memory tags and the age identifiers of the marks. This would identify where and when the vehicle was registered given a valid registration marks. The final portion of the program was written to suggest alternative for those characters that have misidentified during neural network processing.

Finally a agent-based system was build for discovering information about the status of the vehicles with a particular registration marks.