Prevention of Unauthorized Transport of Ore in Opencast Mines Using Automatic Number Plate Recognition

Abstract

Security in mining is a primary concern, which mainly affects the production cost. An efficiently detecting and deterring theft will maximize the profitability of any mining organization. Many illegal transportation cases were registered in spite of rules imposed by central and state governments under Section 23 (c) of MMDR Act 1957. Use of an automated checkpoint gate based on license plate recognition and biometric fingerprint system for vehicle tracking enhances the security in mines. The method was tested on the number plates with various considerations like clean number plates, clean fingerprints, dusty and faded number plates, dusty fingerprints, and number plates captured by varying distance. By considering all the above conditions the pictures were processed by ANPR and bio-metric fingerprint modules. Vehicle license number plate was captured using a digital camera and the captured RGB image was converted to grayscale image. Thresholding was done to remove unwanted areas from the grayscale image. The characters of the number plate were segmented using Gabor filter. A track-sector matrix was generated by considering the number of pixels in each region and was matched with existing template to identify the character. The fingerprint scans the finger and matches with the template created at the time of fingerprint registration at the machine. The micro-controller accepted the processed output in binary form from ANPR and bio-metric fingerprint system. The micro-controller processed the binary output and the checkpoint gate was closed/open based on the output provided by the microcontroller to motor driver.