326 research outputs found
A Robust Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Based on the YOLO Detector
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of
research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current
solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on
many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based
on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detector. The Convolutional Neural Networks
(CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust
under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and
background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a
two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted
License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach
achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset,
composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a
recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better
than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%,
respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second,
targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset,
called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos
and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also
contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In
our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved
recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better,
with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on
Neural Networks (IJCNN) 201
An Efficient and Layout-Independent Automatic License Plate Recognition System Based on the YOLO detector
This paper presents an efficient and layout-independent Automatic License
Plate Recognition (ALPR) system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object
detector that contains a unified approach for license plate (LP) detection and
layout classification to improve the recognition results using post-processing
rules. The system is conceived by evaluating and optimizing different models,
aiming at achieving the best speed/accuracy trade-off at each stage. The
networks are trained using images from several datasets, with the addition of
various data augmentation techniques, so that they are robust under different
conditions. The proposed system achieved an average end-to-end recognition rate
of 96.9% across eight public datasets (from five different regions) used in the
experiments, outperforming both previous works and commercial systems in the
ChineseLP, OpenALPR-EU, SSIG-SegPlate and UFPR-ALPR datasets. In the other
datasets, the proposed approach achieved competitive results to those attained
by the baselines. Our system also achieved impressive frames per second (FPS)
rates on a high-end GPU, being able to perform in real time even when there are
four vehicles in the scene. An additional contribution is that we manually
labeled 38,351 bounding boxes on 6,239 images from public datasets and made the
annotations publicly available to the research community
An End-to-End Automated License Plate Recognition System Using YOLO Based Vehicle and License Plate Detection with Vehicle Classification
An accurate and robust Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) method proves surprising versatility in an Intelligent Transportation and Surveillance (ITS) system. However, most of the existing approaches often use prior knowledge or fixed pre-and-post processing rules and are thus limited by poor generalization in complex real-life conditions. In this paper, we leverage a YOLO-based end-to-end generic ALPR pipeline for vehicle detection (VD), license plate (LP) detection and recognition without exploiting prior knowledge or additional steps in inference. We assess the whole ALPR pipeline, starting from vehicle detection to the LP recognition stage, including a vehicle classifier for emergency vehicles and heavy trucks. We used YOLO v2 in the initial stage of the pipeline and remaining stages are based on the state-of-the-art YOLO v4 detector with various data augmentation and generation techniques to obtain LP recognition accuracy on par with current proposed methods. To evaluate our approach, we used five public datasets from different regions, and we achieved an average recognition accuracy of 90.3% while maintaining an acceptable frames per second (FPS) on a low-end GPU
Vehicle-Rear: A New Dataset to Explore Feature Fusion for Vehicle Identification Using Convolutional Neural Networks
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 plate.
This is an attempt to tackle a major problem: false alarms caused by vehicles
with similar designs or by very close license plate identifiers. In the first
network stream, shape similarities are identified by a Siamese CNN that uses a
pair of low-resolution vehicle patches recorded by two different cameras. In
the second stream, we use a CNN for OCR to extract textual information,
confidence scores, and string similarities from a pair of high-resolution
license plate patches. Then, features from both streams are merged by a
sequence of fully connected layers for decision. In our experiments, we
compared the two-stream network against several well-known CNN architectures
using single or multiple vehicle features. The architectures, trained models,
and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/icarofua/vehicle-rear
System for automatic detection and classification of cars in traffic
Objective: To develop a system for automatic detection and classification of cars in traffic in the form of a device for autonomic, real-time car detection, license plate recognition, and car color, model, and make identification from video.
Methods: Cars were detected using the You Only Look Once (YOLO) v4 detector. The YOLO output was then used for classification in the next step. Colors were classified using the k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) algorithm, whereas car models and makes were identified with a single-shot detector (SSD). Finally, license plates were detected using the OpenCV library and Tesseract-based optical character recognition. For the sake of simplicity and speed, the subsystems were run on an embedded Raspberry Pi computer.
Results: A camera was mounted on the inside of the windshield to monitor cars in front of the camera. The system processed the camera’s video feed and provided information on the color, license plate, make, and model of the observed car. Knowing the license plate number provides access to details about the car owner, roadworthiness, car or license place reports missing, as well as whether the license plate matches the car. Car details were saved to file and displayed on the screen. The system was tested on real-time images and videos. The accuracies of car detection and car model classification (using 8 classes) in images were 88.5% and 78.5%, respectively. The accuracies of color detection and full license plate recognition were 71.5% and 51.5%, respectively. The system operated at 1 frame per second (1 fps).
Conclusion: These results show that running standard machine learning algorithms on low-cost hardware may enable the automatic detection and classification of cars in traffic. However, there is significant room for improvement, primarily in license plate recognition. Accordingly, potential improvements in the future development of the system are proposed
Unified Chinese License Plate Detection and Recognition with High Efficiency
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 Chinese LP dataset with
annotations of vertices. With CRPD, a unified detection and recognition network
with high efficiency is presented as the baseline. The network is end-to-end
trainable with totally real-time inference efficiency (30 fps with 640p). The
experiments on several public benchmarks demonstrate that our method has
reached competitive performance. The code and dataset will be publicly
available at https://github.com/yxgong0/CRPD
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