Abstract
In our work, we concentrate on the problem of car license plate recognition after the plate has been extracted from an image. Traditional methods approach this problem as three separate steps: preprocessing, segmentation, and recognition. In this paper, we propose a unified approach that integrates these steps using a fully convolutional network. We train a 36-class FCN on a dataset of single characters and apply it to height-normalized license plates. The architecture of this model successfully reduces the loss in detail during end-to-end convolution. Finally, we extract the results from the output sequences of probabilities using a variant of the NMS algorithm. The experiments on public license plate datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
This research is conducted during the Research Science Initiative — Tsinghua 2016.
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Acknowledgements
I want to give special thanks to Ruoqi Zhang and Fanfu Shentu, who helped me during data collection and network visualization. Also, I would like to thank my writing coach, Aradhana Sinha, and tutor, Ms. Qianhui Wu, who helped me revise my paper.
Last but not the least, I would like to show my gratitude to Tsinghua University and Center for Excellence in Education for the computational resources and for providing me with such a wonderful research opportunity this summer.
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Wu, Y., Li, J. (2017). License Plate Recognition Using Deep FCN. In: Sun, F., Liu, H., Hu, D. (eds) Cognitive Systems and Signal Processing. ICCSIP 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 710. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5230-9_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5230-9_25
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