• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.776-788
• /
• 2020

In this paper, a vehicle type recognition system using deep learning and a license plate recognition system are proposed. In the existing system, the number plate area extraction through image processing and the character recognition method using DNN were used. These systems have the problem of declining recognition rates as the environment changes. Therefore, the proposed system used the one-stage object detection method YOLO v3, focusing on real-time detection and decreasing accuracy due to environmental changes, enabling real-time vehicle type and license plate character recognition with one RGB camera. Training data consists of actual data for vehicle type recognition and license plate area detection, and synthetic data for license plate character recognition. The accuracy of each module was 96.39% for detection of car model, 99.94% for detection of license plates, and 79.06% for recognition of license plates. In addition, accuracy was measured using YOLO v3 tiny, a lightweight network of YOLO v3.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
• /
• v.5 no.11
• /
• pp.511-520
• /
• 2016

Automatic License Plate Detection (ALPD) is a key technology for a efficient traffic control. It is used to improve work efficiency in many applications such as toll payment systems and parking and traffic management. Until recently, the hand-crafted features made for image processing are used to detect license plates in most studies. It has the advantage in speed. but can degrade the detection rate with respect to various environmental changes. In this paper, we propose a way to utilize a Faster Region based Convolutional Neural Networks (Faster R-CNN) and a Conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which improves the computational speed and is robust against changed environments. The module based on Faster R-CNN is used to detect license plate candidate regions from images and is followed by the module based on CNN to remove False Positives from the candidates. As a result, we achieved a detection rate of 99.94% from images captured under various environments. In addition, the average operating speed is 80ms/image. We implemented a fast and robust Real-Time License Plate Detection System.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.43 no.2
• /
• pp.186-195
• /
• 2016

This paper proposes a vehicle license plate detection method in real road environments using 8 bit-MCT features and a landmark-based Adaboost method. The proposed method allows identification of the potential license plate region, and generates a saliency map that presents the license plate's location probability based on the Adaboost classification score. The candidate regions whose scores are higher than the given threshold are chosen from the saliency map. Each candidate region is adjusted by the local image variance and verified by the SVM and the histograms of the 8bit-MCT features. The proposed method achieves a detection accuracy of 85% from various road images in Korea and Europe.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2003.10a
• /
• pp.1249-1253
• /
• 2003

License plate recognition is very important in an automobile society. This is because, since plate detection accuracy has large influence on subsequent number recognition, it is very important. However, it is very difficult to do it, because a background and a body color of cars are similar to that of the license plate. In this paper, we propose a new thresholds determination method in the various background by using the real-coded genetic algorithm (RGA). By using RGA, the most likely plate colors are decided under various lighting conditions. First, the average brightness Y values of images are calculated. Next, relationship between the Y value and the most likely plate color thresholds (upper and lower bounds)are obtained by RGA. The relationship between thresholds decided from RGA and brightness average is aproximate by using the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm. In the case of plate detection, thresholds are decided from these functions.

• 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.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.453-462
• /
• 2021

A lot of license plate data is required for car number recognition. License plate data needs to be balanced from past license plates to the latest license plates. However, it is difficult to obtain data from the actual past license plate to the latest ones. In order to solve this problem, a license plate recognition study through deep learning is being conducted by creating a synthetic license plates. Since the synthetic data have differences from real data, and various data augmentation techniques are used to solve these problems. Existing data augmentation simply used methods such as brightness, rotation, affine transformation, blur, and noise. In this paper, we apply a style transformation method that transforms synthetic data into real-world data styles with data augmentation methods. In addition, real license plate data are noisy when it is captured from a distance and under the dark environment. If we simply recognize characters with input data, chances of misrecognition are high. To improve character recognition, in this paper, we applied the DeblurGANv2 method as a quality improvement method for character recognition, increasing the accuracy of license plate recognition. The method of deep learning for license plate detection and license plate number recognition used YOLO-V5. To determine the performance of the synthetic license plate data, we construct a test set by collecting our own secured license plates. License plate detection without style conversion recorded 0.614 mAP. As a result of applying the style transformation, we confirm that the license plate detection performance was improved by recording 0.679mAP. In addition, the successul detection rate without image enhancement was 0.872, and the detection rate was 0.915 after image enhancement, confirming that the performance improved.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
• /
• v.24 no.6_2
• /
• pp.699-706
• /
• 2021

Existing license plate recognition system is used as an optical character recognition method, but a method of using deep learning has been proposed in recent studies because it has problems with image quality and Korean misrecognition. This requires a lot of data collection, but the collection of license plates is not easy to collect due to the problem of the Personal Information Protection Act, and labeling work to designate the location of individual license plates is required, but it also requires a lot of time. Therefore, in this paper, to solve this problem, five types of license plates were created using a virtual Korean license plate generation program according to the notice of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. And the generated license plate is synthesized in the license plate part of collectable vehicle images to construct 10,147 learning data to be used in deep learning. The learning data classifies license plates, Korean, and numbers into individual classes and learn using YOLOv5. Since the proposed method recognizes letters and numbers individually, if the font does not change, it can be recognized even if the license plate standard changes or the number of characters increases. As a result of the experiment, an accuracy of 96.82% was obtained, and it can be applied not only to the learned license plate but also to new types of license plates such as new license plates and eco-friendly license plates.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.661-680
• /
• 2016

The vehicle license plate recognition (VLPR) system analyzes and monitors the speed of vehicles, theft of vehicles, the violation of traffic rules, illegal parking, etc., on the motorway. The VLPR consists of three major parts: license plate detection (LPD), license plate character segmentation (LPCS), and license plate character recognition (LPCR). This paper presents an efficient method for the LPCS and LPCR of Korean vehicle license plates (LPs). LP tilt adjustment is a very important process in LPCS. Radon transformation is used to correct the tilt adjustment of LP. The global threshold segmentation method is used for segmented LP characters from two different types of Korean LPs, which are a single row LP (SRLP) and double row LP (DRLP). The cross-correlation matching method is used for LPCR. Our experimental results show that the proposed methods for LPCS and LPCR can be easily implemented, and they achieved 99.35% and 99.85% segmentation and recognition accuracy rates, respectively for Korean LPs.

• Smart Media Journal
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.92-98
• /
• 2020

This paper proposes a vehicle license plate recognition system using light weight deep learning models without high-end server. The proposed license plate recognition system consists of 3 steps: [license plate detection]-[character area segmentation]-[character recognition]. SSD-Mobilenet was used for license plate detection, ResNet with localization was used for character area segmentation, ResNet was used for character recognition. Experiemnts using Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG Q9, accuracy showed 85.3% accuracy and around 1.1 second running time.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.21 no.6
• /
• pp.705-711
• /
• 2011

This paper proposes an effective algorithm of license plate recognition for industrial applications. By applying Canny edge detection on a vehicle image, it is possible to find a connected rectangular, which is a strong candidate for license plate. The color information of license plate separates plates into white and green. Then, OTSU binary image processing and foreground neighbor pixel propagation algorithm CLNF will be applied to each license plates to reduce noise except numbers and letters. Finally, through labeling, numbers and letters will be extracted from the license plate. Letter and number regions, separated from the plate, pass through mesh method and thinning process for extracting feature vectors by X-Y projection method. The extracted feature vectors are compared with the pre-learned weighting values by backpropagation neural network to execute final recognition process. The experiment results show that the proposed license plate recognition algorithm works effectively.