• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.2509-2528
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• 2019

There are various styles of license plates for different countries and use cases that require style-specific methods. In this paper, we propose and illustrate a multi-style license plate recognition system. The proposed system performs a series of processes for license plate candidates detection, structure classification, character segmentation and character recognition, respectively. Specifically, we introduce a license plate structure classification process to identify its style that precedes character segmentation and recognition processes. We use a K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm with pre-training steps to recognize numbers and characters on multi-style license plates. To show feasibility of our multi-style license plate recognition system, we evaluate our system for multi-style license plates covering single line, double line, different backgrounds and character colors on Korean and the U.S. license plates. For the evaluation of Korean license plate recognition, we used a 50 minutes long input video that contains 138 vehicles of 6 different license plate styles, where each frame of the video is processed through a series of license plate recognition processes. From two experiments results, we show that various LP styles can be recognized under 50 ms processing time and with over 99% accuracy, and can be extended through additional learning and training steps.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.1008-1016
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• 2015

This paper proposes a method for detecting the front side of vehicles. The method can find the car side with a license plate even with complicated and cluttered backgrounds. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to solve the detection problem as a unified framework combining feature detection, classification, searching, and localization estimation and improve the reliability of the system with simplicity of usage. The proposed CNN structure avoids sliding window search to find the locations of vehicles and reduces the computing time to achieve real-time processing. Multiple responses of the network for vehicle position are further processed by a weighted clustering and probabilistic threshold decision method. Experiments using real images in parking lots show the reliability of the method.