License plate location based on trichromatic imaging and color-discrete characteristic

License plate location (LPL) is the key part of automatic license plate recognition (LPR) system that plays an important role in many applications and a number of LPL methods based on color information have been proposed. However, some problems, such as country specific, similar color interference, lighting variation sensitive, time consuming, processing only one kind of LP with same color combination a time and omitting the case of more than one combinations in a LP, should be solved further. In this study, a color-based LPL method that consists of three modules: color edge extraction, denoising and searching, is proposed. Color edge extraction, the kernel of the proposed, is designed by color-discrete characteristics of license plates in the trichromatic wavebands. In the experiment, 1384 images taken from natural scenes in China and other 104 countries or regions are employed. Of which, 74 have been failed to locate the license plates. The success rate and average execution time are 94.7% and 57 ms, respectively.