Towards End-to-End Car License Plates Detection and Recognition with Deep Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified deep neural network that simultaneously detects and recognizes car license plates in natural scene images, improving speed and accuracy over traditional step-by-step methods.

Contribution

A novel end-to-end deep neural network that jointly performs license plate detection and recognition in a single forward pass.

Findings

Effective detection and recognition across diverse scenes

Faster processing compared to separate task approaches

Validated on three different datasets

Abstract

In this work, we tackle the problem of car license plate detection and recognition in natural scene images. We propose a unified deep neural network which can localize license plates and recognize the letters simultaneously in a single forward pass. The whole network can be trained end-to-end. In contrast to existing approaches which take license plate detection and recognition as two separate tasks and settle them step by step, our method jointly solves these two tasks by a single network. It not only avoids intermediate error accumulation, but also accelerates the processing speed. For performance evaluation, three datasets including images captured from various scenes under different conditions are tested. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.