Case Study: ATAPY Software achieves mobile, accurate license plate recognition with ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine Powers Car Number Plates Recognition Technology

ABBYY, a leading provider of text recognition technologies, partnered with ATAPY Software to address a city-scale traffic control challenge: how to automatically and reliably read thousands of car license plates using Windows Mobile smartphones. The project required porting ATAPY’s ANPR SDK—powered by ABBYY’s OCR—to a resource-constrained mobile environment that must operate offline, handle varied camera angles and skew, and support multiple country-specific plate formats.

ATAPY implemented a mobile ANPR solution using the ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine, combining smart image preprocessing, plate localization, character segmentation, automatic skew correction (up to ~30°) and optimized recognition for low-power CPUs. The SDK now runs inside a parking enforcement app, returning plate text and metadata (coordinates, confidence, images), delivering about 90% recognition quality, faster, more accurate data capture, cost and time savings, and fully mobile offline operation for enforcement and access-control workflows.

ATAPY Software