A Comparative Study on Detection and Recognition of Nonuniform License Plates

This paper presents a comparative study on license plate detection and recognition algorithms in unconstrained environments, which include varying illuminations, nonstandard plate templates, and different English language fonts. A prime objective of this study is to assess how well these models handle such challenges. These problems are common in developing countries like Pakistan where diverse license plates, styles, and abrupt changes in illuminations make license plates detection and recognition a challenging task. To analyze the license plate detection problem Faster-RCNN and end-to-end (E2E) methods are implemented. For the license plate recognition task, deep neural network and the CA-CenterNet-based methods are compared. Detailed simulations were performed on authors’ own collected dataset of Pakistani license plates, which contains substantially different multi-styled license plates. Our study concludes that, for the task of license plate detection, Faster-RCNN yields a detection accuracy of 98.35%, while the E2E method delivers 98.48% accuracy. Both detection algorithms yielded a mean detection accuracy of 98.41%. For license plate recognition task, the DNN-based method yielded a recognition accuracy of 98.90%, while the CA-CenterNet-based method delivered a high accuracy of 98.96%. In addition, a detailed computational complexity comparison on various image resolutions revealed that E2E and the CA-CenterNet are more efficient than their counterparts during detection and recognition tasks, respectively.