A Robust License Plate Recognition Model Based on Bi-LSTM

License plate detection and recognition are still important and challenging tasks in natural scenes. At present, most methods have favorable effect on license plate recognition under restrictive conditions, and most of such license plates are shot under good angle and light conditions. However, for license plates under non-restrictive conditions, such as dark, bright, rotated conditions etc. from the Chinese City Parking Dataset (CCPD), the performance of some methods of license plate recognition will be significantly reduced. In order to improve the accuracy of license plate recognition under unrestricted conditions, a robust license plate recognition model is proposed in this paper, which mainly includes license plate feature extraction, license plate character localization, and feature extraction of characters. First of all, the model can activate the regional features of characters and fully extract the character features of license plates. Then locate each license plate character through Bi-LSTM combined with the context location information of license plates. Finally, 1D-Attention is adopted to enhance useful character features after Bi-LSTM positioning, and reduce useless character features to realize effective acquisition of character features of license plates. A large number of experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good performance under unrestricted conditions, which proves the effectiveness and robustness of the model. In CCPD-Base, CCPD-DB, CCPD-FN, CCPD-Tilt, CCPD-Weather, CCPD-Challenge and other sub-datasets, the recognition rates reach 99.3%, 98.5%, 98.6%, 96.4%, 99.3% and 86.6% respectively.