License Plate Recognition Systems

Automatic License/Number Plate Recognition systems come in all shapes and sizes:

• ANPR performed in controlled lighting conditions with predictable license plate types can use basic image processing techniques.
• More advanced ANPR systems utilize dedicated object detectors, such as HOG + Linear SVM, Faster R-CNN, SSDs, and YOLO, to localize license plates in images.
• State-of-the-art ANPR software utilizes Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) to aid in better OCR’ing of the text from the license plates themselves.
• And even more advanced ANPR systems use specialized neural network architectures to pre-process and clean images before they are OCR’d, thereby improving ANPR accuracy.