A hierarchical RCNN for vehicle and vehicle license plate detection and recognition

Vehicle and vehicle license detection obtained incredible achievements during recent years that are also popularly used in real traffic scenarios, such as intelligent traffic monitoring systems, auto parking systems, and vehicle services. Computer vision attracted much attention in vehicle and vehicle license detection, benefit from image processing and machine learning technologies. However, the existing methods still have some issues with vehicle and vehicle license plate recognition, especially in a complex environment. In this paper, we propose a multivehicle detection and license plate recognition system based on a hierarchical region convolutional neural network (RCNN). Firstly, a higher level of RCNN is employed to extract vehicles from the original images or video frames. Secondly, the regions of the detected vehicles are input to a lower level (smaller) RCNN to detect the license plate. Thirdly, the detected license plate is split into single numbers. Finally, the individual numbers are recognized by an even smaller RCNN. The experiments on the real traffic database validated the proposed method. Compared with the commonly used all-in-one deep learning structure, the proposed hierarchical method deals with the license plate recognition task in multiple levels for sub-tasks, which enables the modification of network size and structure according to the complexity of sub-tasks. Therefore, the computation load is reduced

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

Real-time human detection for electricity conservation using pruned-SSD and arduino

Electricity conservation techniques have gained more importance in recent years. Many smart techniques are invented to save electricity with the help of assisted devices like sensors. Though it saves electricity, it adds an additional sensor cost to the system. This work aims to develop a system that manages the electric power supply, only when it is actually needed i.e., the system enables the power supply when a human is present in the location and disables it otherwise. The system avoids any additional costs by using the closed circuit television, which is installed in most of the places for security reasons. Human detection is done by a Modified-single shot detection with a specific hyperparameter tuning method. Further the model is pruned to reduce the computational cost of the framework which in turn reduces the processing speed of the network drastically. The model yields the output to the Arduino micro-controller to enable the power supply in and around the location only when a human is detected and disables it when the human exits. The model is evaluated on CHOKEPOINT dataset and real-time video surveillance footage. Experimental results have shown an average accuracy of 85.82% with 2.1 seconds of processing time per frame

License Plate Detection using Deep Learning and Font Evaluation

License plate detection (LPD) in context is a challenging problem due to its sensitivity to environmental factors. Moreover, the chosen font type in the license plate (LP) plays a vital role in the recognition phase in computer-based studies. This work is two folded. On one hand, we propose to employ Deep Learning technique (namely, You Only Look Once (YOLO)) in the LPD. On the other hand, we propose to evaluate font characteristics in the LP context. This work uses 2 different datasets: UFPR-ALPR, and the newly created CENPARMI datasets. We propose a YOLO-based adaptive algorithm with tuned parameters to enhance its performance. In addition to report the recall ratio results, this work will conduct a detailed error analysis to provide some insights into the type of false positives. The proposed model achieved competitive recall ratio of 98.38% with a single YOLO network. Some fonts are challenging for humans to read; however, other fonts are challenging for computer systems to recognize. Here, we present 2 sets of results for font evaluation: font anatomy results, and commercial products recognition results. For anatomy results, 2 fonts are considered: Mandatory, and Driver Gothic. Moreover, we evaluate the effect of the used fonts in context for the two datasets using 2 commercial products: OpenALPR and Plate Recognizer. The font anatomy results revealed some important confusion cases and some quality features of both fonts. The obtained results show that the Driver font has no severe confusion cases in contrast to the Mandatory font