Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have attracted much research attention recently, leading to impressive results for natural image generation. However, to date little success was observed in using GAN generated images for improving classification tasks. Here we attempt to explore, in the context of car license plate recognition, whether it is possible to generate synthetic training data using GAN to improve recognition accuracy. With a carefully-designed pipeline, we show that the answer is affirmative. First, a large-scale image set is generated using the generator of GAN, without manual annotation. Then, these images are fed to a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) followed by a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM), which performs the feature learning and sequence labelling. Finally, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned on real images. Our experimental results on a few data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of using GAN images: an improvement of 7.5 over a strong baseline with moderate-sized real data being available. We show that the proposed framework achieves competitive recognition accuracy on challenging test datasets. We also leverage the depthwise separate convolution to construct a lightweight convolutional RNN, which is about half size and 2x faster on CPU. Combining this framework and the proposed pipeline, we make progress in performing accurate recognition on mobile and embedded devices.
Learning based algorithms including support vector machine @cite_16 , hidden Markov model (HMM) @cite_22 and neural networks @cite_43 @cite_38 are more robust than the template matching based methods since they extract discriminative features. However, the segmentation process loses information about inner rules in license plates and the segmentation performance has a significant influence on the recognition performance. Li and Shen @cite_7 proposed a cascade framework using deep convolutional neural networks and LSTMs for license plate recognition without segmentation, where a sliding window is applied to extracting feature sequence. Our method is also a segmentation-free approach based on framework proposed by @cite_3 , where a deep CNN is applied for feature extracting directly without a sliding window, and a bidirectional LSTM network is used for sequence labeling.
@cite_38 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_3 @cite_43 @cite_16
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Chinese character font recognition (CCFR) has received increasing attention as the intelligent applications based on optical character recognition becomes popular. However, traditional CCFR systems do not handle noisy data effectively. By analyzing in detail the basic strokes of Chinese characters, we propose that font recognition on a single Chinese character is a sequence classification problem, which can be effectively solved by recurrent neural networks. For robust CCFR, we integrate a principal component convolution layer with the 2-D long short-term memory (2DLSTM) and develop principal component 2DLSTM (PC-2DLSTM) algorithm. PC-2DLSTM considers two aspects: 1) the principal component layer convolution operation helps remove the noise and get a rational and complete font information and 2) simultaneously, 2DLSTM deals with the long-range contextual processing along scan directions that can contribute to capture the contrast between character trajectory and background. Experiments using the frequently used CCFR dataset suggest the effectiveness of PC-2DLSTM compared with other state-of-the-art font recognition methods. In this work, we tackle the problem of car license plate detection and recognition in natural scene images. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various vision applications, here we leverage DNNs to learn high-level features in a cascade framework, which lead to improved performance on both detection and recognition. Firstly, we train a @math -class convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect all characters in an image, which results in a high recall, compared with conventional approaches such as training a binary text non-text classifier. False positives are then eliminated by the second plate non-plate CNN classifier. Bounding box refinement is then carried out based on the edge information of the license plates, in order to improve the intersection-over-union (IoU) ratio. The proposed cascade framework extracts license plates effectively with both high recall and precision. Last, we propose to recognize the license characters as a sequence labelling problem. A recurrent neural network (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) is trained to recognize the sequential features extracted from the whole license plate via CNNs. The main advantage of this approach is that it is segmentation free. By exploring context information and avoiding errors caused by segmentation, the RNN method performs better than a baseline method of combining segmentation and deep CNN classification; and achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy. Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which evidently verifies the generality of it. Despite the success of license plate recognition (LPR) methods in the past decades, few of them can process multi-style license plates (LPs), especially LPs from different nations, effectively. In this paper, we propose a new method for multi-style LP recognition by representing the styles with quantitative parameters, i.e., plate rotation angle, plate line number, character type and format. In the recognition procedure these four parameters are managed by relevant algorithms, i.e., plate rotation, plate line segmentation, character recognition and format matching algorithm, respectively. To recognize special style LPs, users can configure the method by defining corresponding parameter values, which will be processed by the relevant algorithms. In addition, the probabilities of the occurrence of every LP style are calculated based on the previous LPR results, which will result in a faster and more precise recognition. Various LP images were used to test the proposed method and the results proved its effectiveness. An algorithm for license plate recognition (LPR) applied to the intelligent transportation system is proposed on the basis of a novel shadow removal technique and character recognition algorithms. This paper has two major contributions. One contribution is a new binary method, i.e., the shadow removal method, which is based on the improved Bernsen algorithm combined with the Gaussian filter. Our second contribution is a character recognition algorithm known as support vector machine (SVM) integration. In SVM integration, character features are extracted from the elastic mesh, and the entire address character string is taken as the object of study, as opposed to a single character. This paper also presents improved techniques for image tilt correction and image gray enhancement. Our algorithm is robust to the variance of illumination, view angle, position, size, and color of the license plates when working in a complex environment. The algorithm was tested with 9026 images, such as natural-scene vehicle images using different backgrounds and ambient illumination particularly for low-resolution images. The license plates were properly located and segmented as 97.16 and 98.34 , respectively. The optical character recognition system is the SVM integration with different character features, whose performance for numerals, Kana, and address recognition reached 99.5 , 98.6 , and 97.8 , respectively. Combining the preceding tests, the overall performance of success for the license plate achieves 93.54 when the system is used for LPR in various complex conditions.