License Plate Recognition System for Taiwanese Vehicles Using Cascade of YOLOv4 Detectors

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study of the license plate recognition (LPR) system for Taiwanese vehicles using a cascade of You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) detectors. The LPR system is composed of a vehicle detection model, a license plate (LP) detection model, an LP corner prediction model, and an LPR model. Herein, the pretrained YOLOv4 model was directly applied to vehicle detection. The YOLOv4 framework was adopted in the LP detection and LP recognition models, performing transfer learning on each model. Furthermore, to enhance the accuracy of the LPR system, an LP corner prediction model was developed in this study to predict the four corner positions of an LP to perform a perspective transformation on the plate for alignment purposes. The experimental results show that our LPR system achieves an accuracy of 98.88% when tested on 2049 images of the application-oriented LP dataset, outperforming most LPR systems reported in the literature.