An intelligent license plate detection and recognition model using deep neural networks

One of the largest automotive sectors in the world is India. The number of vehicles traveling by road has increased in recent times. In malls or other crowded places, many vehicles enter and exit the parking area. Due to the increase in vehicles, it is difficult to manually note down the license plate number of all the vehicles passing in and out of the parking area. Hence, it is necessary to develop an Automatic License Plate Detection and Recognition (ALPDR) model that recognize the license plate number of vehicles automatically. To automate this process, we propose a three-step process that will detect the license plate, segment the characters and recognize the characters present in it. Detection is done by converting the input image to a bi-level image. Using region props the characters are segmented from the detected license plate. A two-layer CNN model is developed to recognize the segmented characters. The proposed model automatically updates the details of the car entering and exiting the parking area to the database. The proposed ALPDR model has been tested in several conditions such as blurred images, different distances from the cameras, day and night conditions on the stationary vehicles. Experimental result shows that the proposed system achieves 91.1%, 96.7%, and 98.8% accuracy on license plate detection, segmentation, and recognition respectively which is superior to state-of-the-art literature models.