ABSTRACT

With the movement of inter-State vehicles and goods, there is rise in the number of toll roads and bridges. Which overall increases the load on highway roads. Hence scientific tracking and monitoring system becomes a need of the toll tax department. The proper collection of toll fees can generate a huge quantum of funds for the maintenance of aging bridges and the large road network.

Hence to improve the toll tax collection system and to reduce the traffic at toll tax depots we will develop a system called No Queue Toll Tax Collection System.

Existing System

There are two ways of collecting toll tax being in practice at present. First is the traditional manual method where one person collects the money and issues a receipt. The other one is RFID system where automatically balance gets deducted from the account to open the barrier.

Both the above mentioned method for collecting toll tax is little time consuming method. Chances of escaping the payment of toll tax are there. It leads to queuing up of following vehicles.

THE PROPOSED SYSTEM

The very simple fundamental to solve the queuing problem is to change the entire system from prepaid to postpaid using the following methodology…

The system can be developed along with hardware or as pure software.

Detection of Vehicle ID using Hardware + Software Design…

Each vehicle will be provided by an RF TX tag containing a unique ID. This tag will continuously emit RF signals. When the vehicle will reach at the toll booth the RF receiver will detect these RF signals. The signals are amplified and are passed to microcontroller. This microcontroller will display the id on LCD. Now, with the help of PC interface unit the data collected is passed to PC through serial port.

Detection of Vehicle ID using Pure Software Design…

To detect the vehicle id we can use image processing technique. We can connect a camera to the PC kept on the toll tax booth in which OpenCV based algorithm will automatically detect the number plate of the vehicle.

The Toll Tax Processing at PC Side…

Software developed will show all the details about the vehicle on the screen. Details like date, time and id will be stored in the access database. Based on these details a report will be prepared.

At the end of the month the system will print the detailed bill and the total amount of the toll tax for the month will also be printed. This bill will be sent to the user for payment.

The following are the major advantages over current system…

• Automatic collection of toll tax.
• Free flow of traffic.
• Time saving.
• Record maintenance.
• Problems with pursuing toll evaders.

The below is the Block Diagram for H/W + S/W

FOR PURE SOFTWARE BASED SYSTEM…

The camera captures the image of vehicle. The captured image is passed through the license plate extractor and its output is given to the segmentation part. Character segmentation separates the characters individually and the character recognition is performed which gives the result as the plate number. This license plate number is verified in the central database and bill updated and vehicle passes through it.

The below is the Block Diagram for pure software

STEPS INVOLVED IN IMAGE PROCESSING…

Video Capturing:

PC sends the command to camera to capture the video. Camera captures the video of the current scenario at toll plaza.

PC performs image enhancement:

Smoothing:

Smoothing is also called as blurring, is a simple and frequently used image processing operation. It is usually done to reduce noise and camera artifacts.

Conversion of color image to grayscale:

After the smoothing operation is performed on video, it is then converted into grayscale.

Thresholding:

Thresholding is the simplest method of image segmentation. It is a non-linear operation that converts a grayscale image into a binary image where the two levels are assigned to pixels that are below or above the specified threshold value.

Erosion and Dilation:

As the result of thresholding operation gives black and white image. But this image contains lots of noise in it. To reduce the noise erosion and dilation operations are perform.

Perform OCR(On the Contour using Contour Analysis):

The contour is a boundary of object, a population of points (pixels), and separating object from a background. In a CA, the contour is encoded by the sequence consisting of complex numbers. On a contour, the point which is called as starting point is fixed. Then, the contour is scanned (is admissible – clockwise), and each vector of offset is noted by a complex number a+ib. Where a – point offset on x axis, and b – offset on y axis. Offset is noted concerning the previous point.

Generate Number Plate String:

This step will display all the characters and numbers on the screen. Now, then we have to rearrange all the characters and numbers in their proper order with the help of sorting algorithms. This will give us vehicle Number Plate.

Search in Database:

Once the number plate is obtained, this number plate string is searches in the database for the verification purpose. If the number plate string is present in the database then it will indicate the vehicle is authorized otherwise not.

Update Bill:

Once it is confirmed that vehicle is authenticated then toll or money regarding that vehicle gets deducted from vehicle owner account. This will make an entry in database every time that vehicle passes from that toll plaza.

The below is the GUI for pure software