Developing learning-based preprocessing methods for detecting complicated vehicle licence plates

Abstract

A licence plate detection (LPD) system is an important tool in several roadway traffic applications. This study aims to develop an advanced detection system that works well in complicated scenarios. It proposes a robust preprocessing enhancement method for accurately detecting the licence plates from difficult vehicle images. The proposed method includes the combination of a Gaussian filter, an enhancement cumulative histogram equalization method, and a contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization technique. The local binary pattern and median filter with histogram of oriented gradient descriptors are used as powerful tools to extract key features from three types of licence plate resolutions. The extracted features are used as input to support vector machine classifier. Processing methods, such as a position-based method are used with the detector to reduce unwanted bounding boxes, as well as false positive values. Four databases consisting of 2050 vehicle images under different conditions are used. Various detection metrics, object localization, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results on vehicles databases in several languages, including English, Chinese, and Arabic number plates, show that the proposed method has achieved significant performance improvements. It outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both the detection rate and the processing time. The detection rate when trained with 1520 LP images is 99.62% with a false positive rate of 1.675% for complicated images. The average detection time per vehicle image is 0.2408 milliseconds.