Abstract
Digital Video Recorder (DVR) system has found many applications nowadays. Besides traditional long hour and high resolution recordings, some special functions such as fast and intelligent retrieving, pattern recognition, etc., are expected of modern DVR. In this study, our goal is to design a multi-channel DVR system with automatic automobile plate recognition capability for use in a parking station surveillance and management environment. We focus our research on two main parts: hardware design of video Mux (multiplexer)/DeMux (demultiplexer) and image capture circuits used in the multi-channel DVR system, and software design of automobile plate recognition. The Mux and DeMux circuits can merge multi-channel digital video signal into one channel and split one channel into multi-channel digital video signals, respectively. The image capture hardware can capture image data of one frame and send it to DSP for further processing. All these three functions are designed and implemented in an FPGA chip. For the automobile plate recognition, we develop a simple software program that contains an image enhancement, an automobile plate ROI grab, and a characters recognition module to extract and identify the plate number in captured auto image. These functions can be easily augmented with other control functions to tailor the DVR system for various application purposes.