ResNet and LSTM Based Accurate Approach for License Plate Detection and Recognition

The identification and recognition of automatic license plates (ALP) are critical for traffic surveillance, parking management, and preserving the rhythm of modern urban life. In this paper, a deep learning-based method is proposed for ALP. In the proposed work, the license plate region is initially segmented in a given vehicle image, and the plate number and city region are extracted from the segmented license plate region. Residual neural networks (ResNet) architecture-based deep feature extraction is considered. The fully connected layer of the ResNet model is used to obtain the deep features for the cropped Arabic numbers and city regions, respectively. The extracted features are fed into the sequential input layer of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) classifier. Various experiments are carried out on a dataset that was collected in the northern Iraq region and the classification accuracy score is used for performance evaluation. According to the obtained results, the proposed method is effective where the calculated accuracy scores were 98.51% and 100% for Arabic numbers and city regions, respectively. The performance comparison of the proposed method with some of the existing methods indicates the high performance of the proposed study.