A Light CNN for End-to-End Car License Plates Detection and Recognition

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is of great significance due to its wide range of applications in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). It is an important and challenging research topic in image recognition fields. However, many of the current methods are still not robust in real-world complex scenario. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a multi-task convolutional neural network for license plate detection and recognition (MTLPR) with better accuracy and lower computational cost, and introduce a comprehensive data set of Chinese license plate. First, we train a Multi-task Convolutional Neural Networks (MTCNN) to detect license plate. Then we introduce an end-to-end method to recognize license plate information, which further improves the recognition precision. Last, We compare the experimental result with other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental result shows that our method achieves up to 98% recognition precision and is superior to other methods in the precision and speed of detection and recognition.