License plate recognition systems have a very important role in many applications such as toll management, parking control, and traffic management. In this paper, a framework of deep convolutional neural networks is proposed for Iranian license plate recognition. The first CNN is the YOLOv3 network that detects the Iranian license plate in the input image while the second CNN is a Faster R-CNN that recognizes and classifies the characters in the detected license plate. A dataset of Iranian license plates consisting of ill-conditioned images also developed in this paper. The YOLOv3 network achieved 99.6% mAP, 98.26% recall, 98.08% accuracy, and average detection speed is only 23ms. Also, the Faster R-CNN network trained and tested on the developed dataset and achieved 98.97% recall, 99.9% precision, and 98.8% accuracy. The proposed system can recognize the license plate in challenging situations like unwanted data on the license plate. Comparing this system with other Iranian license plate recognition systems shows that it is Faster, more accurate and also this system can work in an open environment.
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto（奥罗普雷托联邦大学）；Universidade Federal do Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been the focus of many researches in the past years. In general, ALPR is divided into the following problems: detection of on-track vehicles, license plates detection, segmention of license plate characters and optical character recognition (OCR). Even though commercial solutions are available for controlled acquisition conditions, e.g., the entrance of a parking lot, ALPR is still an open problem when dealing with data acquired from uncontrolled environments, such as roads and highways when relying only on imaging sensors. Due to the multiple ori…
Malek Ashtar University of Technology（马利克·阿什塔尔工业大学）
Object detection has always been practical. There are so many things in our world that recognizing them can not only increase our automatic knowledge of the surroundings, but can also be lucrative for those interested in starting a new business. One of these attractive objects is the license plate (LP). In addition to the security uses that license plate detection can have, it can also be used to create creative businesses. With the development of object detection methods based on deep learning models, an appropriate and comprehensive dataset becomes doubly important. But due to the frequent c…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Recently, deep learning-based methods have reached an excellent performance on License Plate (LP) detection and recognition tasks. However, it is still challenging to build a robust model for Chinese LPs since there are not enough large and representative datasets. In this work, we propose a new dataset named Chinese Road Plate Dataset (CRPD) that contains multi-objective Chinese LP images as a supplement to the existing public benchmarks. The images are mainly captured with electronic monitoring systems with detailed annotations. To our knowledge, CRPD is the largest public multi-objective Ch…
Toward Advancing License Plate Super-Resolution in Real-World Scenarios: A Dataset and Benchmark
Federal University of Paraná（巴西南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Brazilian Federal Police（巴西联邦警察）；Federal University of Minas Gerais（巴西矿务联邦大学）；Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná（帕尔米拉天主教大学）
Federal University of Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）；Federal Institute of Paraná（巴拉那联邦理工学院）；Federal University of Ouro Preto（欧鲁普雷图联邦大学）
Public datasets have played a key role in advancing the state of the art in License Plate Recognition (LPR). Although dataset bias has been recognized as a severe problem in the computer vision community, it has been largely overlooked in the LPR literature. LPR models are usually trained and evaluated separately on each dataset. In this scenario, they have often proven robust in the dataset they were trained in but showed limited performance in unseen ones. Therefore, this work investigates the dataset bias problem in the LPR context. We performed experiments on eight datasets, four collected…
We evaluated a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) called LPRNet [1] for automatic License Plate Recognition (LPR). We evaluated the algorithm on two datasets, one composed of real license plate images and the other of synthetic license plate images. In addition, we compared its performance against Tesseract [2], an Optical Character Recognition engine. We measured performance based on recognition accuracy and Levenshtein Distance. LPRNet is an end-to-end framework and demonstrated robust performance on both datasets, delivering 90 and 89 percent recognition accuracy on test sets of…
TransLPRNet: Lite Vision-Language Network for Single/Dual-line Chinese License Plate Recognition
Hubei Key Laboratory of Intelligent Vision Based Monitoring for Hydroelectric Engineering, China Three Gorges University（水电工程智能视觉监测湖北省重点实验室，中国三峡大学）；College of Computer and Information Technology, China Three Gorges University（计算机与信息学院，中国三峡大学）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Digital Finance Innovation（数字金融创新湖北省重点实验室）；School of Information Engineering, Hubei University of Economics（信息工程学院，湖北经济学院）
LPLCv2: An Expanded Dataset for Fine-Grained License Plate Legibility Classification
1 0.15mm Federal University of Paran\'a, Curitiba, Brazil；2 0.15mm Department of Technological Development；3 0.15mm Pontifical Catholic University of Paran\'a, Curitiba, Brazil
COMSATS University Islamabad（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（英联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））；Australian National University (ANU)（澳大利亚国立大学（ANU））；University of Technology Sydney (UTS)（悉尼科技大学（UTS））
We propose an automatic framework for toll collection, consisting of three steps: vehicle type recognition, license plate localization, and reading. However, each of the three steps becomes non-trivial due to image variations caused by several factors. The traditional vehicle decorations on the front cause variations among vehicles of the same type. These decorations make license plate localization and recognition difficult due to severe background clutter and partial occlusions. Likewise, on most vehicles, specifically trucks, the position of the license plate is not consistent. Lastly, for l…
LPLC: A Dataset for License Plate Legibility Classification
1 Department of Informatics, Federal University of Paran\'a, Curitiba, Brazil；2 Department of Technological Development；3 Graduate Program in Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Paran\'a, Curitiba, Brazil
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（台湾科技大学）
Automatic license plate recognition plays a crucial role in modern transportation systems such as for traffic monitoring and vehicle violation detection. In real-world scenarios, license plate recognition still faces many challenges and is impaired by unpredictable interference such as weather or lighting conditions. Many machine learning based ALPR solutions have been proposed to solve such challenges in recent years. However, most are not convincing, either because their results are evaluated on small or simple datasets that lack diverse surroundings, or because they require powerful hardwar…
[-15pt]1 Federal University of Technology - Paran\' a , Curitiba, Brazil 2 Federal University of Paran\'a, Curitiba, Brazil [0.5ex]
This work addresses the problem of vehicle identification through non-overlapping cameras. As our main contribution, we introduce a novel dataset for vehicle identification, called Vehicle-Rear, that contains more than three hours of high-resolution videos, with accurate information about the make, model, color and year of nearly 3,000 vehicles, in addition to the position and identification of their license plates. To explore our dataset we design a two-stream CNN that simultaneously uses two of the most distinctive and persistent features available: the vehicle's appearance and its license p…
Government Engineering College, Barton Hill（巴顿山政府工程学院）
License Plate Recognition Systems are used to determine the license plate number of a vehicle. The current system mainly uses Optical Character Recognition to recognize the number plate. There are several problems to this system. Some of them include interchanging of several letters or numbers (letter O with digit 0), difficulty in localizing the license plate, high error rate, use of different fonts in license plates etc. So a new system to recognize the license plate number using color coding of license plates is proposed in this paper. Easier localization of license plate can be done by sea…
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；EEasy Technology Company Ltd.（易易科技有限公司）
License plate detection is the first and essential step of the license plate recognition system and is still challenging in real applications, such as on-road scenarios. In particular, small-sized and oblique license plates, mainly caused by the distant and mobile camera, are difficult to detect. In this work, we propose a novel and applicable method for degraded license plate detection via vehicle-plate relation mining, which localizes the license plate in a coarse-to-fine scheme. First, we propose to estimate the local region around the license plate by using the relationships between the ve…
Detection and recognition of a licence plate is important when automating weighbridge services. While many large databases are available for Latin and Chinese alphanumeric license plates, data for Indian License Plates is inadequate. In particular, databases of Indian commercial truck license plates are inadequate, despite the fact that commercial vehicle license plate recognition plays a profound role in terms of logistics management and weighbridge automation. Moreover, models to recognise license plates are not effectively able to generalise to such data due to its challenging nature, and d…
MCKV Institute of Engineering（MCKV工程学院）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a challenging area of research due to its importance to variety of commercial applications. The overall problem may be subdivided into two key modules, firstly, localization of license plates from vehicle images, and secondly, optical character recognition of extracted license plates. In the current work, we have concentrated on the first part of the problem, i.e., localization of license plate regions from Indian commercial vehicles as a significant step towards development of a complete ALPR system for Indian vehicles. The technique is based on c…
Indian vehicle number plates have wide variety in terms of size, font, script and shape. Development of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) solutions is therefore challenging, necessitating a diverse dataset to serve as a collection of examples. However, a comprehensive dataset of Indian scenario is missing, thereby, hampering the progress towards publicly available and reproducible ANPR solutions. Many countries have invested efforts to develop comprehensive ANPR datasets like Chinese City Parking Dataset (CCPD) for China and Application-oriented License Plate (AOLP) dataset for US. In …
This paper proposes LPRNet - end-to-end method for Automatic License Plate Recognition without preliminary character segmentation. Our approach is inspired by recent breakthroughs in Deep Neural Networks, and works in real-time with recognition accuracy up to 95% for Chinese license plates: 3 ms/plate on nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and 1.3 ms/plate on Intel Core i7-6700K CPU. LPRNet consists of the lightweight Convolutional Neural Network, so it can be trained in end-to-end way. To the best of our knowledge, LPRNet is the first real-time License Plate Recognition system that does not use RNNs. As …
Smart automated traffic enforcement solutions have been gaining popularity in recent years. These solutions are ubiquitously used for seat-belt violation detection, red-light violation detection and speed violation detection purposes. Highly accurate license plate recognition is an indispensable part of these systems. However, general license plate recognition systems require high resolution images for high performance. In this study, we propose a novel license plate recognition method for general roadway surveillance cameras. Proposed segmentation free license plate recognition algorithm util…
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a challenging problem to the research community due to its potential applicability in the diverse geographical condition over the globe with varying license plate parameters. Any ALPR system includes three main modules, viz. localization of the license plate, segmentation of the characters therein and recognition of the segmented characters. In real life applications where the images are captured over days and nights in an outdoor environment with varying lighting and weather conditions, varying pollution level and wind turbulences, localization, s…
Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology（阿赫萨努拉科技大学）；United International University（联合国际大学）
Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ALPR) is a system for automatically identifying the license plates of any vehicle. This process is important for tracking, ticketing, and any billing system, among other things. With the use of information and communication technology (ICT), all systems are being automated, including the vehicle tracking system. This study proposes a hybrid method for detecting license plates using characters from them. Our captured image information was used for the recognition procedure in Bangladeshi vehicles, which is the topic of this study. Here, for license plate dete…
Nowadays in developing or developed countries, the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technology has attracted so much attention to itself. License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems have many applications in ITSs, such as the payment of parking fee, controlling the traffic volume, traffic data collection, etc. This paper presents a new and fast method for license plate extraction based on edge analysis. our proposed method consist of four stage, which are edge detection, non-useable edge and noise removing, edge analysis and morphology-based license plate extraction. In the result part, the…
Identity of a vehicle is done through the vehicle license plate by traffic police in general. Au- tomatic vehicle license plate recognition has several applications in intelligent traffic management systems. The security situation across the globe and particularly in India demands a need to equip the traffic police with a system that enables them to get instant details of a vehicle. The system should be easy to use, should be mobile, and work 24 x 7. In this paper, we describe a mobile phone based, client-server architected, license plate recognition system. While we use the state of the art i…
Military Institute of Science & Technology (MIST)（军事科学技术研究院）
Computer vision coupled with Deep Learning (DL) techniques bring out a substantial prospect in the field of traffic control, monitoring and law enforcing activities. This paper presents a YOLOv4 object detection model in which the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is trained and tuned for detecting the license plate of the vehicles of Bangladesh and recognizing characters using tesseract from the detected license plates. Here we also present a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based on Tkinter, a python package. The license plate detection model is trained with mean average precision (mAP) of 90…
This work details Sighthounds fully automated license plate detection and recognition system. The core technology of the system is built using a sequence of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) interlaced with accurate and efficient algorithms. The CNNs are trained and fine-tuned so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g. variations in pose, lighting, occlusion, etc.) and can work across a variety of license plate templates (e.g. sizes, backgrounds, fonts, etc). For quantitative analysis, we show that our system outperforms the leading license plate detection and recognition…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Minsheng Fintech Corp. LTD（民生金融科技有限公司）
Recognizing car license plates in natural scene images is an important yet still challenging task in realistic applications. Many existing approaches perform well for license plates collected under constrained conditions, eg, shooting in frontal and horizontal view-angles and under good lighting conditions. However, their performance drops significantly in an unconstrained environment that features rotation, distortion, occlusion, blurring, shading or extreme dark or bright conditions. In this work, we propose a robust framework for license plate recognition in the wild. It is composed of a ta…
Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering（穆克什·帕特尔技术与工程管理学院）
With ever increasing number of vehicles, vehicular tracking is one of the major challenges faced by urban areas. In this paper we try to develop a model that can locate a particular vehicle that the user is looking for depending on two factors 1. the Type of vehicle and the 2. License plate number of the car. The proposed system uses a unique mixture consisting of Mask R-CNN model for vehicle type detection, WpodNet and pytesseract for License Plate detection and Prediction of letters in it.
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
In this work, we tackle the problem of car license plate detection and recognition in natural scene images. We propose a unified deep neural network which can localize license plates and recognize the letters simultaneously in a single forward pass. The whole network can be trained end-to-end. In contrast to existing approaches which take license plate detection and recognition as two separate tasks and settle them step by step, our method jointly solves these two tasks by a single network. It not only avoids intermediate error accumulation, but also accelerates the processing speed. For perfo…
University Federal of Ouro Preto（奥罗普雷托联邦大学）；Univ. Federal of Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）
Due to the increasingly need for automatic traffic monitoring, vehicle license plate detection is of high interest to perform automatic toll collection, traffic law enforcement, parking lot access control, among others. In this paper, a sliding window approach based on Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features is used for Brazilian license plate detection. This approach consists in scanning the whole image in a multiscale fashion such that the license plate is located precisely. The main contribution of this work consists in a deep study of the best setup for HOG descriptors on the detect…
A Training-Free Framework for Video License Plate Tracking and Recognition with Only One-Shot
Unmanned System Research Institute（无人系统研究院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能与光学电子学院（iOPEN））
With the development of deep learning, Neural Network is commonly adopted to the License Plate Detection (LPD) task and achieves much better performance and precision, especially CNN-based networks can achieve state of the art RetinaNet[1]. For a single object detection task such as LPD, modified general object detection would be time-consuming, unable to cope with complex scenarios and a cumbersome weights file that is too hard to deploy on the embedded device.
In this paper, we propose a real-time and accurate automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) approach. Our study illustrates the outstanding design of ALPR with four insights: (1) the resampling-based cascaded framework is beneficial to both speed and accuracy; (2) the highly efficient license plate recognition should abundant additional character segmentation and recurrent neural network (RNN), but adopt a plain convolutional neural network (CNN); (3) in the case of CNN, taking advantage of vertex information on license plates improves the recognition performance; and (4) the weight-sharing …
Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR)（拉曼大学）；MIMOS Berhad
Automated car license plate recognition systems are developed and applied for purpose of facilitating the surveillance, law enforcement, access control and intelligent transportation monitoring with least human intervention. In this paper, an algorithm based on SIFT feature points clustering and matching is proposed to address the issue of recognizing Malaysian special plates. These special plates do not follow the format of standard car plates as they may contain italic, cursive, connected and small letters. The algorithm is tested with 150 Malaysian special plate images under different envir…
Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM)（马来西亚马六甲技术大学）
Most vehicle license plate recognition use neural network techniques to enhance its computing capability. The image of the vehicle license plate is captured and processed to produce a textual output for further processing. This paper reviews image processing and neural network techniques applied at different stages which are preprocessing, filtering, feature extraction, segmentation and recognition in such way to remove the noise of the image, to enhance the image quality and to expedite the computing process by converting the characters in the image into respective text. An exemplar experimen…
BRAC University（BRAC大学）；University of Dayton（戴顿大学）
In the last few years, the deep learning technique in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is using massively in the field of computer vision and machine learning. This deep learning technique provides state-of-the-art accuracy in different classification, segmentation, and detection tasks on different benchmarks such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Microsoft COCO, and ImageNet. However, there are a lot of research has been conducted for Bangla License plate recognition with traditional machine learning approaches in last decade. None of them are used to deploy a physical system for …
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
In this work, we tackle the problem of car license plate detection and recognition in natural scene images. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various vision applications, here we leverage DNNs to learn high-level features in a cascade framework, which lead to improved performance on both detection and recognition. Firstly, we train a $37$-class convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect all characters in an image, which results in a high recall, compared with conventional approaches such as training a binary text/non-text classifier. False positives are then eliminate…
In this paper, we propose an automatic and mechanized license and number plate recognition (LNPR) system which can extract the license plate number of the vehicles passing through a given location using image processing algorithms. No additional devices such as GPS or radio frequency identification (RFID) need to be installed for implementing the proposed system. Using special cameras, the system takes pictures from each passing vehicle and forwards the image to the computer for being processed by the LPR software. Plate recognition software uses different algorithms such as localization, orie…
Adversarial sample generation and training using geometric masks for accurate and resilient license plate character recognition
University of Miami（迈阿密大学）；Advanced College of Engineering and Management, Tribhuvan University（特里布万大学高级工程与管理学院）；University of Missouri-St. Louis（密苏里大学圣路易斯分校）
License plate detection and recognition (LPDR) is of growing importance for enabling intelligent transportation and ensuring the security and safety of the cities. However, LPDR faces a big challenge in a practical environment. The license plates can have extremely diverse sizes, fonts and colors, and the plate images are usually of poor quality caused by skewed capturing angles, uneven lighting, occlusion, and blurring. In applications such as surveillance, it often requires fast processing. To enable real-time and accurate license plate recognition, in this work, we propose a set of techniqu…
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai University（上海大学上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；Playground Global
Training a good deep learning model often requires a lot of annotated data. As a large amount of labeled data is typically difficult to collect and even more difficult to annotate, data augmentation and data generation are widely used in the process of training deep neural networks. However, there is no clear common understanding on how much labeled data is needed to get satisfactory performance. In this paper, we try to address such a question using vehicle license plate character recognition as an example application. We apply computer graphic scripts and Generative Adversarial Networks to g…
Learning-based algorithms for automated license plate recognition implicitly assume that the training and test data are well aligned. However, this may not be the case under extreme environmental conditions, or in forensic applications where the system cannot be trained for a specific acquisition device. Predictions on such out-of-distribution images have an increased chance of failing. But this failure case is oftentimes hard to recognize for a human operator or an automated system. Hence, in this work we propose to model the prediction uncertainty for license plate recognition explicitly. Su…
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿物大学）
License Plate recognition plays an important role on the traffic monitoring and parking management systems. In this paper, a fast and real time method has been proposed which has an appropriate application to find tilt and poor quality plates. In the proposed method, at the beginning, the image is converted into binary mode using adaptive threshold. Then, by using some edge detection and morphology operations, plate number location has been specified. Finally, if the plat has tilt, its tilt is removed away. This method has been tested on another paper data set that has different images of the …
University of Western São Paulo（西圣保罗大学）；São Paulo State University（圣保罗州立大学）；São Carlos Engineering School (USP)（圣卡洛斯工程学院（圣保罗大学））
This paper presents a new approach for the automatic license plate recognition, which includes the SIFT algorithm in step to locate the plate in the input image. In this new approach, besides the comparison of the features obtained with the SIFT algorithm, the correspondence between the spatial orientations and the positioning associated with the keypoints is also observed. Afterwards, an algorithm is used for the character recognition of the plates, very fast, which makes it possible its application in real time. The results obtained with the proposed approach presented very good success rate…
SVS College of Engineering and Technology（SVS工程技术学院）；SSK College of Engineering & Technology（SSK工程技术学院）
It is believed that there are currently millions of vehicles on the roads worldwide. The over speed of vehicles,theft of vehicles, disobeying traffic rules in public, an unauthorized person entering the restricted area are keep on increasing. In order restrict against these criminal activities, we need an automatic public security system. Each vehicle has their own Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as their primary identifier. The VIN is actually a License Number which states a legal license to participate in the public traffic. The proposed paper is to identify the vehicle with the help of …
LPTR-AFLNet: Lightweight Integrated Chinese License Plate Rectification and Recognition Network
Hubei Key Laboratory of Intelligent Vision Based Monitoring for Hydroelectric Engineering, China Three Gorges University（湖北水利水电工程智能视觉监测重点实验室，中国三峡大学）；College of Computer and Information Technology, China Three Gorges University（计算机与信息学院，中国三峡大学）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Digital Finance Innovation（湖北省数字金融创新重点实验室）；School of Information Engineering, Hubei University of Economics（信息工程学院，湖北经济学院）
While vehicle license plate recognition (VLPR) is usually done with a sliding window approach, it can have limited performance on datasets with characters that are of variable width. This can be solved by hand-crafting algorithms to prescale the characters. While this approach can work fairly well, the recognizer is only aware of the pixels within each detector window, and fails to account for other contextual information that might be present in other parts of the image. A sliding window approach also requires training data in the form of presegmented characters, which can be more difficult t…
