中英文翻译A configurable method for multi-style license platerecognitionAutomatic license plate recognition (LPR) has been a practical technique in the past decades. Numerous applications, such as automatic toll collection, criminal pursuit and traffic law enforcement , have been benefited from it . Although some novel techniques, for example RFID (radio frequency identification), WSN (wireless sensor network), etc., have been proposed for car ID identification, LPR on image data is still an indispensable technique in current intelligent transportation systems for its convenience and low cost. LPR is generally divided into three steps: license plate detection, character segmentation and character recognition. The detection step roughly classifies LP and non-LP regions, the segmentation step separates the symbols/characters from each other in one LP so that only accurate outline of each image block of characters is left for the recognition, and the recognition step finally converts greylevel image block into characters/symbols by predefined recognition models. Although LPR technique has a long research history, it is still driven forward by various arising demands, the most frequent one of which is the variation of LP styles, for example:(1) Appearance variation caused by the change of image capturing conditions.(2) Style variation from one nation to another.(3) Style variation when the government releases new LP format.We summed them up into four factors, namely rotation angle, line number, character type and format, after comprehensive analyses of multi-style LP characteristics on real data. Generally speaking, any change of the above four factors can result in the change of LP style or appearance and then affect the detection, segmentation or recognition algorithms. If one LP has a large rotation angle, the segmentation and recognition algorithms for horizontal LP may not work. If there are more than one character lines in one LP, additional line separation algorithm is needed before a segmentation process. With the variation of character types when we apply the method from one nation to another, the ability to re-define the recognition models is needed. What is more, the change of LP styles requires the method to adjust by itself so that the segmented and recognized character candidates can match best with an LP format.Several methods have been proposed for multi-national LPs or multiformat LPs in the past years while few of them comprehensively address the style adaptation problem in terms of the abovementioned factors. Some of them only claim the ability of processing multinational LPs by redefining the detection and segmentation rules or recognition models.In this paper, we propose a configurable LPR method which is adaptable from one style to another, particularly from one nation to another, by defining the four factors as parameters. Users can constrain the scope of a parameter and at the same time the method will adjust itself so that the recognition can be faster and more accurate. Similar to existing LPR techniques, we also provide details of detection, segmentation and recognition algorithms. The difference is that we emphasize on the configurable framework for LPR and the extensibility of the proposed method for multistyle LPs instead of the performance of each algorithm.In the past decades, many methods have been proposed for LPR that contains detection, segmentation and recognition algorithms. In the following paragraphs, these algorithms and LPR methods based on them are briefly reviewed.LP detection algorithms can be mainly classified into three classes according to the features used, namely edgebased algorithms, colorbased algorithms and texture-based algorithms. The most commonly used method for LP detection is certainly the combinations of edge detection and mathematical morphology .In these methods, gradient (edges) is first extracted from the image and then a spatial analysis by morphology is applied to connect the edges into LP regions. Another way is counting edges on the image rows to find out regions of dense edges or to describe the dense edges in LP regions by a Hough transformation .Edge analysis is the most straightforward method with low computation complexity and good extensibility. Compared with edgebased algorithms, colorbased algorithms depend more on the application conditions. Since LPs in a nation often have several predefined colors, researchers have defined color models to segment region of interests as the LP regions .This kind of method can be affected a lot by lighting conditions. To win both high recall and low false positive rates, texture classification has been used for LP detection. In Ref.Kim et al. used an SVM to train texture classifiers to detect image block that contains LP pixels.In Ref. the authors used Gabor filters to extract texture features in multiscales and multiorientations to describe the texture properties of LP regions. In Ref