Robust License Plate Recognition with Shared Adversarial Training Network

Abstract

Recently, deep learning has greatly promoted the performance of license plate recognition (LPR) by learning robust features from numerous labeled data. However, the large variation of wild license plates across complicated environments and perspectives is still a huge challenge to the robust LPR. To solve the problem, we propose an effective and efficient shared adversarial training network (SATN) in this paper, which can learn the environment-independent and perspective-free semantic features from wild license plates with the prior knowledge of standard stencil-rendered license plates, as standard stencil-rendered license plates are independent of complicated environments and various perspectives. Besides, to correct the features of heavily perspective distorted license plates perfectly, we further propose a novel dual attention transformation (DAT) module in the shared adversarial training network. Comprehensive experiments on AOLP-RP and CCPD benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the LPR task.