Real-time Bhutanese license plate localization using YOLO

The Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) is one of the intelligent transportation systems which provides a safe and secure mode of transportation. In ALPR technology, recognition accuracy entirely depends on the performance of the localization phase. This paper presents the real-time Bhutanese license plate (LP) localization using YOLO (You Only Look Once). The vehicle detection was performed before the LP localization to eliminate the false positives generated by the signboards as they look similar to LPs. A single convolutional neural network gave an overall mean average precision of 98.6% with the training loss of 0.0231 for vehicle and LP.