Toward End-to-End Car License Plate Detection and Recognition With Deep Neural Networks

In this paper, we tackle the problem of car license plate detection and recognition in natural scene images. We propose a unified deep neural network, which can localize license plates and recognize the letters simultaneously in a single forward pass. The whole network can be trained end-to-end. In contrast to existing approaches which take license plate detection and recognition as two separate tasks and settle them step by step, our method jointly solves these two tasks by a single network. It not only avoids intermediate error accumulation but also accelerates the processing speed. For performance evaluation, four data sets including images captured from various scenes under different conditions are tested. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed approach.