Deep Learning System for Automatic License Plate Detection and Recognition

The detection and recognition of a vehicle License Plate (LP) is a key technique in most of the applications related to vehicle movement. Moreover, it is a quite popular and active research topic in the field of image processing. Different methods, techniques and algorithms have been developed to detect and recognize LPs. Nevertheless, due to the LP characteristics that vary from one country to another in terms of numbering system, colors, language of characters, fonts and size. Further investigations are still needed in this field in order to make the detection and recognition process very efficient. Although this domain has been covered by a lot of researchers, various existing systems operate under well-defined and controlled conditions. For example, some frameworks require complicated hardware to make good quality images or capture images from vehicles with very slow speed. For this reason the detection and recognition of LPs in different conditions and under several climatic variations remains always difficult to realize with good results. For that, we present in this paper an automatic system for LP detection and recognition based on deep learning approach, which is divided into three parts: detection, segmentation, and character recognition. To detect an LP, many pretreatment steps should be made before applying the first Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model for the classification of plates / non-plates. Subsequently, we apply a few pre-processing steps to segment the LP and finally to recognize all the characters in upper case format (A-Z) and digits (0-9), using a second CNN model with 37 classes. The performance of the suggested system is tested on two datasets which contain images under various conditions, such as poor picture quality, image perspective distortion, bright day, night and complex environment. A great percentage of the results show the accuracy of the suggested system.