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

Recognition and Detection of Vehicle License Plates Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The rise in toll road usage has sparked a lot of interest in the newest, most effective, and most innovative intelligent transportation system (ITS), such as the Vehicle License Plate Recognition (VLPR) approach. This research uses Convolutional Neural Networks to deliver effective deep learning principally based on Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for detection and recognition of numerous License Plates (LPs) (CNN). Two fully convolutional one-stage object detectors are utilized in ALPRNet to concurrently identify and categorize LPs and characters, followed by an assembly module that outputs the LP strings. Object detectors are typically employed in CNN-based approaches such as You Only Look Once (YOLO), Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), and Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) to locate LPs. The VLPR model is used here to detect license plates using You Only Look Once (YOLO) and to recognize characters in license plates using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Unlike existing methods, which treat license plate detection and recognition as two independent problems to be solved one at a time, the proposed method accomplishes both goals using a single network. Matlab R2020a was used as a tool

Recognition and Detection of Vehicle License Plates Using Convolutional Neural Networks

The rise in toll road usage has sparked a lot of interest in the newest, most effective, and most innovative intelligent transportation system (ITS), such as the Vehicle License Plate Recognition (VLPR) approach. This research uses Convolutional Neural Networks to deliver effective deep learning principally based on Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for detection and recognition of numerous License Plates (LPs) (CNN). Two fully convolutional one-stage object detectors are utilized in ALPRNet to concurrently identify and categorize LPs and characters, followed by an assembly module that outputs the LP strings. Object detectors are typically employed in CNN-based approaches such as You Only Look Once (YOLO), Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), and Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) to locate LPs. The VLPR model is used here to detect license plates using You Only Look Once (YOLO) and to recognize characters in license plates using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Unlike existing methods, which treat license plate detection and recognition as two independent problems to be solved one at a time, the proposed method accomplishes both goals using a single network. Matlab R2020a was used as a tool

Towards End-to-end Car License Plate Location and Recognition in Unconstrained Scenarios

Benefiting from the rapid development of convolutional neural networks, the performance of car license plate detection and recognition has been largely improved. Nonetheless, challenges still exist especially for real-world applications. In this paper, we present an efficient and accurate framework to solve the license plate detection and recognition tasks simultaneously. It is a lightweight and unified deep neural network, that can be optimized end-to-end and work in real-time. Specifically, for unconstrained scenarios, an anchor-free method is adopted to efficiently detect the bounding box and four corners of a license plate, which are used to extract and rectify the target region features. Then, a novel convolutional neural network branch is designed to further extract features of characters without segmentation. Finally, recognition task is treated as sequence labelling problems, which are solved by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) directly. Several public datasets including images collected from different scenarios under various conditions are chosen for evaluation. A large number of experiments indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in both speed and precision