License Plate Detection and Recognition in Unconstrained Scenarios

Despite the large number of both commercial and academic methods for Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), most existing approaches are focused on a specific license plate (LP) region (e.g. European, US, Brazilian, Taiwanese, etc.), and frequently explore datasets containing approximately frontal images. This work proposes a complete ALPR system focusing on unconstrained capture scenarios, where the LP might be considerably distorted due to oblique views. Our main contribution is the introduction of a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) capable of detecting and rectifying multiple distorted license plates in a single image, which are fed to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) method to obtain the final result. As an additional contribution, we also present manual annotations for a challenging set of LP images from different regions and acquisition conditions. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method, without any parameter adaptation or fine tuning for a specific scenario, performs similarly to state-of-the-art commercial systems in traditional datasets, and outperforms both academic and commercial approaches in challenging datasets.