Vehicle license plate recognition is a crucial task in intelligent traffic management systems. However, the challenge of achieving accurate recognition persists due to motion blur from fast-moving vehicles. Despite the widespread use of image synthesis approaches in existing deblurring and recognition algorithms, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains unproven. To address this, we introduce the first large-scale license plate deblurring dataset named License Plate Blur (LPBlur), captured by a dual-camera system and processed through a post-processing pipeline to avoid misalignment issues. Then, we propose a License Plate Deblurring Generative Adversarial Network (LPDGAN) to tackle the license plate deblurring: 1) a Feature Fusion Module to integrate multi-scale latent codes; 2) a Text Reconstruction Module to restore structure through textual modality; 3) a Partition Discriminator Module to enhance the model's perception of details in each letter. Extensive experiments validate the reliability of the LPBlur dataset for both model training and testing, showcasing that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art motion deblurring methods in realistic license plate deblurring scenarios. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/haoyGONG/LPDGAN.
VRAE: Vertical Residual Autoencoder for License Plate Denoising and Deblurring
Ha Noi University of Science and Technology（河内科学技术大学）；Center of Environmental Intelligence（环境智能中心）；VinUniversity（文大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
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…
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…
National Institute of Technology, Warangal（瓦朗加尔国家理工学院）
Vehicle theft is arguably one of the fastest-growing types of crime in India. In some of the urban areas, vehicle theft cases are believed to be around 100 each day. Identification of stolen vehicles in such precarious scenarios is not possible using traditional methods like manual checking and radio frequency identification(RFID) based technologies. This paper presents a deep learning based automatic traffic surveillance system for the detection of stolen/suspicious cars from the closed circuit television(CCTV) camera footage. It mainly comprises of four parts: Select-Detector, Image Quality …
A New Hybrid Model of Generative Adversarial Network and You Only Look Once Algorithm for Automatic License-Plate Recognition
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kharazmi University（卡扎尔米大学电气与计算机工程学院）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen（不莱梅大学数学与计算机科学学院）；School of Computing, University of the Fraser Valley（弗雷泽大学计算机学院）
College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学计算机科学学院）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have attracted much research attention recently, leading to impressive results for natural image generation. However, to date little success was observed in using GAN generated images for improving classification tasks. Here we attempt to explore, in the context of car license plate recognition, whether it is possible to generate synthetic training data using GAN to improve recognition accuracy. With a carefully-designed pipeline, we show that the answer is affirmative. First, a large-scale image set is generated using the generator of GAN, without manual …
Advancing Multinational License Plate Recognition Through Synthetic and Real Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil；Federal University of Paran\'a (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil；Federal Institute of Paran\'a (IFPR), Irati, Brazil；Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP), Ouro Preto, Brazil；Federal University of Technology-Paran\' a (UTFPR), Curitiba, Brazil
In this work we explore the previously proposed approach of direct blind deconvolution and denoising with convolutional neural networks in a situation where the blur kernels are partially constrained. We focus on blurred images from a real-life traffic surveillance system, on which we, for the first time, demonstrate that neural networks trained on artificial data provide superior reconstruction quality on real images compared to traditional blind deconvolution methods. The training data is easy to obtain by blurring sharp photos from a target system with a very rough approximation of the expe…
We describe a novel method of generating high-resolution real-world images of text where the style and textual content of the images are described parametrically. Our method combines text to image retrieval techniques with progressive growing of Generative Adversarial Networks (PGGANs) to achieve conditional generation of photo-realistic images that reflect specific styles, as well as artifacts seen in real-world images. We demonstrate our method in the context of automotive license plates. We assess the impact of varying the number of training images of each style on the fidelity of the gener…
Traffic scene analysis is important for emerging technologies such as smart traffic management and autonomous vehicles. However, such analysis also poses potential privacy threats. For example, a system that can recognize license plates may construct patterns of behavior of the corresponding vehicles' owners and use that for various illegal purposes. In this paper we present a system that enables traffic scene analysis while at the same time preserving license plate privacy. The system is based on a multi-task model whose latent space is selectively compressed depending on the amount of inform…
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…
Next-Generation Parallel Decoder for LPDR: Architectural Optimization and Class-Balanced GAN-Augmentation
School of Electrical Engineering；Computer Science National University of Sciences \& Technology Islamabad, Pakistan sobaid.mscs25seecs.edu.pk；Computer Science National University of Sciences \& Technology Islamabad, Pakistan nchandio.mscs25seecs.edu.pk；Computer Science National University of Sciences \& Technology Islamabad, Pakistan njamil.mscs25seecs.edu.pk；Computer Science National University of Sciences \& Technology Islamabad, Pakistan
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…
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…
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…
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 achi…
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…
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…
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…
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））
Automated Vehicle License Plate (VLP) detection and recognition have ended up being a significant research issue as of late. VLP localization and recognition are some of the most essential techniques for managing traffic using digital techniques. In this paper, four smart systems are developed to recognize Egyptian vehicles license plates. Two systems are based on character recognition, which are (System1, Characters Recognition with Classical Machine Learning) and (System2, Characters Recognition with Deep Machine Learning). The other two systems are based on the whole plate recognition which…
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…
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…
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…
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）
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…
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…
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…
The Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are the subject of a world economic competition. They are the application of new information and communication technologies in the transport sector, to make the infrastructures more efficient, more reliable and more ecological. License Plates Recognition (LPR) is the key module of these systems, in which the License Plate Localization (LPL) is the most important stage, because it determines the speed and robustness of this module. Thus, during this step the algorithm must process the image and overcome several constraints as climatic and lighting co…
