# Identifying license plate number of a thief's car from a video

Motivation:

I recently had my laptop stolen, with lots of pictures of my family, research work and other very important stuff. Of course the theft has been reported, but I think people here are more competent in image processing compared to the local police station :)

Video Recordings

The stealing was captured by a security camera, original .dav files can be downloaded from here:

Converted .avi files can be downloaded (or played in browser) from here:

Description

In the file named ch10 (full name: HCVR_ch10_main_20160501143700_20160501143947) the thief's car enters the frame from the right at 0:48 . In the file named ch13 (full name: HCVR_ch13_main_20160501143811_20160501144205), in the first 2 minutes, the thief's car enters the frame from the right, makes U-turn, steals my stuff, makes a U-turn again and go.

What has been tried?

I tried cropping a few frames around the license plate, stretch so that the plate will be on same position and size on every frame, and averaging. The result wasn't better from the original frames :(

How could I get the number?

• Welcome to DSP! Good luck with recovering your stuff, especially the pics. :-( – Peter K. May 6 '16 at 17:57
• Can you post a few pics of the crops? I had my car stolen once along with a boot full of climbing and sporting equipment. It really sucks. – geometrikal May 15 '16 at 0:17
• Your approach is faulted, I think. Image processing might not be the best option, since the streams are impaired by artifacts, motion, and low resolution. Not to speak of the possibility that you yourself acted illegally by making those videos publicly available (yes, in some countries this might be a problem...). Better: The guy obviously is on the phone. You have an accurate time when and where it happened. Let the police correlate the active callers in the cell with the owners of the brand/type of car. Probably, this is more fruitful than chasing wobbly pixels. Future: Encrypt and backup! – M529 May 15 '16 at 9:40
• Did you finally recover your stolen good? – Laurent Duval Dec 18 '18 at 22:12
• @LaurentDuval :( no – User Jan 3 at 9:01

Averaging may not be the best option, due to motion compensation in video frames: one number (say $8$) may be extrapolated for another (say $3$) on a different JPEG block. It might be interesting to dig into the compressed video format, check motion vectors, but this requires a little bit of hacking.