• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.26 no.9
• /
• pp.49-55
• /
• 2021

In this paper, an enhanced 2-stage vehicle license plate detection scheme using object segmentation is proposed to detect accurately the rotated license plates due to the inclined photographing angles in real-road situations. With the previous 3-stage vehicle license plate detection pipeline model, the detection accuracy is likely decreased as the license plates are declined. To resolve this problem, we propose an enhanced 2-stage model by replacing the frontal two processing stages which are for detecting vehicle area and vehicle license plate respectively in only rectangular shapes in the previous 3-stage model with one step to detect vehicle license plate in arbitrarily shapes using object segmentation. According to the comparison results in terms of the detection accuracy of the proposed 2-stage scheme and the previous 3-stage pipeline model against the rotated license plates, the accuracy of the proposed 2-stage scheme is improved by up to about 20% even though the detection process is simplified.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
• /
• v.20 no.6
• /
• pp.97-105
• /
• 2021

Recently, with the development of IT technology, unmanned systems are being introduced in many industrial fields, and one of the most important factors for introducing unmanned systems in the automobile field is vehicle licence plate recognition(VLPR). The existing VLPR algorithms are configured to use image processing for a specific type of license plate to divide individual areas of a character within the plate to recognize each character. However, as the number of Korean vehicle license plates increases, the law is amended, there are old-fashioned license plates, new license plates, and different types of plates are used for each type of vehicle. Therefore, it is necessary to update the VLPR system every time, which incurs costs. In this paper, we use an object detection algorithm to detect character regardless of the format of the vehicle license plate, and apply a handwritten Hangul recognition(HHR) algorithm to enhance the recognition accuracy of a single Hangul character, which is called a Hangul unit. Since Hangul unit is recognized by combining initial consonant, medial vowel and final consonant, so it is possible to use other Hangul units in addition to the 40 Hangul units used for the Korean vehicle license plate.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.239-245
• /
• 2017

For privacy protection, we propose a vehicle license plate region detection method in road view image served from portal site. Because vehicle license plate regions in road view images have different feature depending on distance, long distance vehicle license plate regions are not detected by feature of low resolution. Therefore, we suggest a method to detect short distance vehicle license plate regions by edge feature and long distance vehicle license plate regions using MSER feature. And then, we select candidate region of vehicle license plate region from detected region of each method, because the number of the vehicle license plate has a structural feature, we used it to detect the final vehicle license plate region. As the experiment result, we got a recall rate of 93%, precision rate of 75%, and F-Score rate of 80% in various road view images.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.20 no.8
• /
• pp.1166-1174
• /
• 2017

In general, the detection of the vehicle license plate is a previous step of license plate recognition and has been actively studied for several decades. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to detect a license plate area of a moving vehicle from a video captured by a fixed camera installed on the road using the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) technology. First, license plate images and non-license plate images are applied to a previously learned CNN model (AlexNet) to extract and classify features. Then, after detecting the moving vehicle in the video, CNN detects the license plate area by comparing the features of the license plate region with the features of the license plate area. Experimental result shows relatively good performance in various environments such as incomplete lighting, noise due to rain, and low resolution. In addition, to protect personal information this proposed system can also be used independently to detect the license plate area and hide that area to secure the public's personal information.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.42 no.3
• /
• pp.411-419
• /
• 2020

In real-world intelligent transportation systems, accuracy in vehicle license plate detection and recognition is considered quite critical. Many algorithms have been proposed for still images, but their accuracy on actual videos is not satisfactory. This stems from several problematic conditions in videos, such as vehicle motion blur, variety in viewpoints, outliers, and the lack of publicly available video datasets. In this study, we focus on these challenges and propose a license plate detection and recognition scheme for videos based on a temporal matching prior network. Specifically, to improve the robustness of detection and recognition accuracy in the presence of motion blur and outliers, forward and bidirectional matching priors between consecutive frames are properly combined with layer structures specifically designed for plate detection. We also built our own video dataset for the deep training of the proposed network. During network training, we perform data augmentation based on image rotation to increase robustness regarding the various viewpoints in videos.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.38C no.12
• /
• pp.1114-1125
• /
• 2013

License Plate Detection (LPD) is a key component in automatic license plate recognition system. Despite the success of License Plate Recognition (LPR) methods in the past decades, the problem is quite a challenge due to the diversity of plate formats and multiform outdoor illumination conditions during image acquisition. This paper aims at automatical detection of car license plates via image processing techniques. In this paper, we proposed a real-time and robust method for license plate detection using Heuristic Energy Map(HEM). In the vehicle image, the region of license plate contains many components or edges. We obtain the edge energy values of an image by using the box filter and search for the license plate region with high energy values. Using this energy value information or Heuristic Energy Map(HEM), we can easily detect the license plate region from vehicle image with a very high possibilities. The proposed method consists two main steps: Region of Interest (ROI) Detection and License Plate Detection. This method has better performance in speed and accuracy than the most of existing methods used for license plate detection. The proposed method can detect a license plate within 130 milliseconds and its detection rate is 99.2% on a 3.10-GHz Intel Core i3-2100(with 4.00 GB of RAM) personal computer.

• Korean Journal of Artificial Intelligence
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2024

In this paper, we propose an innovative super-resolution technique to address the issue of reduced accuracy in license plate recognition caused by low-resolution images. Conventional vehicle license plate recognition systems have relied on images obtained from fixed surveillance cameras for traffic detection to perform vehicle detection, tracking, and license plate recognition. However, during this process, image quality degradation occurred due to the physical distance between the camera and the vehicle, vehicle movement, and external environmental factors such as weather and lighting conditions. In particular, the acquisition of low-resolution images due to camera performance limitations has been a major cause of significantly reduced accuracy in license plate recognition. To solve this problem, we propose a Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) model with a parallel structure that combines Multi-Scale and Attention Mechanism. This model is capable of effectively extracting features at various scales and focusing on important areas. Specifically, it generates feature maps of various sizes through a multi-branch structure and emphasizes the key features of license plates using an Attention Mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed model demonstrates significantly improved recognition accuracy compared to existing vehicle license plate super-resolution methods using Bicubic Interpolation.

• Smart Media Journal
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.134-143
• /
• 2020

Vehicle License Plate Recognition is one of the approaches for transportation and traffic safety networks, such as traffic control, speed limit enforcement and runaway vehicle tracking. Although it has been studied for decades, it is attracting more and more attention due to the recent development of deep learning and improved performance. Also, it is largely divided into license plate detection and recognition. In this study, experiments were conducted to improve license plate detection performance by utilizing various object detection methods and WPOD-Net(Warped Planar Object Detection Network) model. The accuracy was improved by selecting the method of detecting the vehicle(s) and then detecting the license plate(s) instead of the conventional method of detecting the license plate using the object detection model. In particular, the final performance was improved through the process of removing noise existing in the image by using the Fast-SRGAN model, one of the Super-Resolution methods. As a result, this experiment showed the performance has improved an average of 4.34% from 92.38% to 96.72% compared to previous studies.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.113-120
• /
• 2020

Recently, the license plate OCR system has been commercialized in a variety of fields and preferred utilizing low-cost embedded systems using only cameras. This system has a high recognition rate of about 98% or more for the environments such as parking lots where non-vehicle is restricted; however, the environments where non-vehicle objects are not restricted, the recognition rate is about 50% to 70%. This low performance is due to the changes in the environment by non-vehicle objects in real-time situations that occur anomaly data which is similar to the license plates. In this paper, we implement the appropriate anomaly detection based on semi-supervised learning for the license plate OCR system in the real-time environment where the appearance of non-vehicle objects is not restricted. In the experiment, we compare systems which anomaly detection is not implemented in the preceding research with the proposed system in this paper. As a result, the systems which anomaly detection is not implemented had a recognition rate of 77%; however, the systems with the semi-supervised learning based on anomaly detection had 88% of recognition rate. Using the techniques of anomaly detection based on the semi-supervised learning was effective in detecting anomaly data and it was helpful to improve the recognition rate of real-time situations.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.93-101
• /
• 2021

In this paper, a vehicle license plate detection scheme is proposed that uses the spatial attention areas to detect accurately the license plates in various real-road situations. First, the previous WPOD-NET was analyzed, and its detection accuracy is evaluated as lower due to the unnecessary noises in the wide detection candidate areas. To resolve this problem, a vehicle license plate detection model is proposed that uses the candidate area of the license plate as a spatial attention areas. And we compared its performance to that of the WPOD-NET, together with the case of using the optimal spatial attention areas using the ground truth data. The experimental results show that the proposed model has about 20% higher detection accuracy than the original WPOD-NET since the proposed scheme uses tight detection candidate areas.