Enhancing automatic license plate recognition in Indian scenarios

Abstract

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology has gained widespread use in many countries, including India. With the explosion in the number of vehicles plying over the roads in the past few years, automating the process of documenting vehicle license plates for use by law enforcement agencies and traffic management authorities has great significance. There have been various advancements in the object detection, object tracking, and optical character recognition domain but integrated pipelines for ALPR in Indian scenarios are a rare occurrence. This paper proposes an architecture that can track vehicles across multiple frames, detect number plates and perform optical character recognition (OCR) on them. A dataset consisting of Indian vehicles for the detection of oblique license plates is collected and a framework to increase the accuracy of OCR using the data across multiple frames is proposed. The proposed system can record license plate readings of vehicles averaging 527.99 and 2157.09 ms per frame using graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) respectively.