Temporal matching prior network for vehicle license plate detection and recognition in videos

In real-world intelligent transportation systems, accuracy in vehicle license plate detection and recognition is considered quite critical. Many algorithms have been proposed for still images, but their accuracy on actual videos is not satisfactory. This stems from several problematic conditions in videos, such as vehicle motion blur, variety in viewpoints, outliers, and the lack of publicly available video datasets. In this study, we focus on these challenges and propose a license plate detection and recognition scheme for videos based on a temporal matching prior network. Specifically, to improve the robustness of detection and recognition accuracy in the presence of motion blur and outliers, forward and bidirectional matching priors between consecutive frames are properly combined with layer structures specifically designed for plate detection. We also built our own video dataset for the deep training of the proposed network. During network training, we perform data augmentation based on image rotation to increase robustness regarding the various viewpoints in videos.