44,348 research outputs found
License Plate Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks Trained on Synthetic Images
In this thesis, we propose a license plate recognition system and study the feasibility
of using synthetic training samples to train convolutional neural networks for a
practical application.
First we develop a modular framework for synthetic license plate generation; to
generate different license plate types (or other objects) only the first module needs
to be adapted. The other modules apply variations to the training samples such as
background, occlusions, camera perspective projection, object noise and camera
acquisition noise, with the aim to achieve enough variation of the object that the
trained networks will also recognize real objects of the same class.
Then we design two convolutional neural networks of low-complexity for license
plate detection and character recognition. Both are designed for simultaneous
classification and localization by branching the networks into a classification and a
regression branch and are trained end-to-end simultaneously over both branches, on
only our synthetic training samples.
To recognize real license plates, we design a pipeline for scale invariant license
plate detection with a scale pyramid and a fully convolutional application of the
license plate detection network in order to detect any number of license plates and
of any scale in an image. Before character classification is applied, potential plate
regions are un-skewed based on the detected plate location in order to achieve an as
optimal representation of the characters as possible. The character classification is
also performed with a fully convolutional sweep to simultaneously find all characters
at once.
Both the plate and the character stages apply a refinement classification where
initial classifications are first centered and rescaled. We show that this simple, yet
effective trick greatly improves the accuracy of our classifications, and at a small
increase of complexity. To our knowledge, this trick has not been exploited before.
To show the effectiveness of our system we first apply it on a dataset of photos
of Italian license plates to evaluate the different stages of our system and which
effect the classification thresholds have on the accuracy. We also find robust training
parameters and thresholds that are reliable for classification without any need for
calibration on a validation set of real annotated samples (which may not always be
available) and achieve a balanced precision and recall on the set of Italian license
plates, both in excess of 98%.
Finally, to show that our system generalizes to new plate types, we compare our
system to two reference system on a dataset of Taiwanese license plates. For this, we
only modify the first module of the synthetic plate generation algorithm to produce
Taiwanese license plates and adjust parameters regarding plate dimensions, then we
train our networks and apply the classification pipeline, using the robust parameters,
on the Taiwanese reference dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on plate
detection (99.86% precision and 99.1% recall), single character detection (99.6%)
and full license reading (98.7%)
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