Developed by Jerry Hsiung and Perry Holen

for Client Team of

Maury Quijada, Angela Chin, and Trang Vy

VehiCool is an app that allows car enthusiasts and travelers to keep track of all the license plates they see on the road or in their travels. Our app allows the user to quickly line-up and snap a photo of a license plate using their android device's back camera, and then tag the plate with useful information. The user can then search and view all of their stored plates to enjoy their growing collection of funny, exotic, or faraway license plates.

Opening the app first loads a splash-screen that contains a logos and our names as developers. After a short delay, the splash-screen fades away to the camera preview page. The app employs fragments that allows activities to be accessed by tabs in the top bar. This allows smooth transitions between pages and appears as if no new activities are opened. We found this to feel much smoother and less disruptive to the flow of the app.

The camera page uses an active preview from the back camera on the device and before displaying it, draws a guidance overlay onto the preview. The overlay is a translucent grey border with a clear rectangular center. The clear center has green corner markings and denotes the area of the preview that should be aligned with the plate. Upon taking a picture, the application crops the photo to only include what is inside the clear center. It then runs text recognition on the photo and passes the photo's directory address along with any recognized text to the tagging page.

The easiest way to install the app is by cloning the repository and compiling the files with your favortite android editor. This can be done with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/shsiung/CS121-LicensePlate.git

The app requires use of a training set for tesseract that needs to be uploaded to the device storage. Please follow the steps below:

1. Go to the following address and download the training set for your language.

2. Unzip the file and then rename the directory tesseract-ocr to tesseract_languages

3. Then upload the training set to your device done with the following command.

    adb push (your-path-to-tesseract_languages) /mnt/sdcard/
   

• Main Directory (CS121-License Plate)
  • VehiCool source files
    • Test files
    • Main source files
      • Java files
      • Resource files
        • Drawables bitmaps
        • Layout files
  • openCV library files
  • tesseract library files

VehiCool uses several open source third party libraries, including:

• For map displaying, we use Google Map API v2.
• For text recognition, we use Tesseract.
• For image processing, we use OpenCV for Android.
• For Android testing, we use Robotium.

VehiCool is licensed with modified BSD license. In plain language: you're allowed to do whatever you wish with the code, modify, redistribute, embed in your products (free or commercial), but you must include copyright, terms of usage and disclaimer as stated in the license, the same way as any other BSD licensed code. You can of course use documentation generated by VehiCool for your products (free or commercial), but you must attribute VehiCool either in documentation itself or other appropriate place such as your website.

Copyright (c) 2014, Jerry Hsiung & Perry Holen All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The License Plate Project for CS121