Improved YOLOv8n Model for Detecting Helmets and License Plates on Electric Bicycles

Wearing helmetswhile riding electric bicycles can significantly reduce head injuries resulting fromtraffic accidents.To effectively monitor compliance,the utilization of target detection algorithms through traffic cameras plays a vital role in identifying helmet usage by electric bicycle riders and recognizing license plates on electric bicycles.However,manual enforcement by traffic police is time-consuming and labor-intensive.Traditional methods face challenges in accurately identifying small targets such as helmets and license plates using deep learning techniques.This paper proposes an enhanced model for detecting helmets and license plates on electric bicycles,addressing these challenges.The proposedmodel improves uponYOLOv8n by deepening the network structure,incorporating weighted connections,and introducing lightweight convolutional modules.These modifications aim to enhance the precision of small target recognition while reducing the model’s parameters,making it suitable for deployment on low-performance devices in real traffic scenarios.Experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves an mAP@0.5 of 91.8%,showing an 11.5%improvement over the baselinemodel,with a 16.2%reduction in parameters.Additionally,themodel achieves a frames per second(FPS)rate of 58,meeting the accuracy and speed requirements for detection in actual traffic scenarios.

Attention U-Net with Multilevel Fusion for License Plate Detection

In recent years,license plate recognition system(LPRS)is widely used in various places.Fast and accurate license plate detection is the first and critical step in LPRS.In order to improve the performance of license plate detection in complex environment,we propose a novel attention U-net with multilevel fusion(AUMF).At first,input images are fed to the network.Then,the feature maps of each level are generated by convolution operations of the original images.Before the feature connection,there are multi-layer splicing and convolution to detect more features.The attention mechanisms are used to retain the information of important regions.In order to ensure that the size of the input and output images are the same,down-sampling and up-sampling are employed to resize the feature mappings between the upper and lower levels.In the complex environment,the AUMF can accurately detect the license plate.To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method,we conducted a series of experiments on the AOLP dataset.The experimental results show that our approach effectively improves the performance of license plate detection under the three different license plate environments of AOLP dataset.

Vehicle Plate Number Localization Using Memetic Algorithms and Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper introduces the third enhanced version of a genetic algorithm-based technique to allow fast and accurate detection of vehicle plate numbers(VPLN)in challenging image datasets.Since binarization of the input image is the most important and difficult step in the detection of VPLN,a hybrid technique is introduced that fuses the outputs of three fast techniques into a pool of connected components objects(CCO)and hence enriches the solution space with more solution candidates.Due to the combination of the outputs of the three binarization techniques,many CCOs are produced into the output pool from which one or more sequences are to be selected as candidate solutions.The pool is filtered and submitted to a new memetic algorithm to select the best fit sequence of CCOs based on an objective distance between the tested sequence and the defined geometrical relationship matrix that represents the layout of the VPLN symbols inside the concerned plate prototype.Using any of the previous versions will give moderate results but with very low speed.Hence,a new local search is added as a memetic operator to increase the fitness of the best chromosomes based on the linear arrangement of the license plate symbols.The memetic operator speeds up the convergence to the best solution and hence compensates for the overhead of the used hybrid binarization techniques and allows for real-time detection especially after using GPUs in implementing most of the used techniques.Also,a deep convolutional network is used to detect false positives to prevent fake detection of non-plate text or similar patterns.Various image samples with a wide range of scale,orientation,and illumination conditions have been experimented with to verify the effect of the new improvements.Encouraging results with 97.55%detection precision have been reported using the recent challenging public Chinese City Parking Dataset(CCPD)outperforming the author of the dataset by 3.05%and the state-of-the-art technique by 1.45%.

Precise and efficient Chinese license plate recognition in the real monitoring scene of intelligent transportation system

In this paper, the performance of you only look once(YOLO) series detectors on Chinese license plate recognition(LPR) in the real intelligent transportation system(ITS) monitoring scene is investigated. Specially, a precise and efficient automatic license plate recognition(ALPR) system based on the YOLOv4 detector is proposed. The proposed ALPR system contains three stages including vehicle detection, license plate detection(LPD) and LPR. In vehicle detection stage, YOLOv4 detector is directly applied. In LPD stage, YOLOv4-tiny detector is exploited. In the last stage, the YOLOv4-tiny detector with attention mechanism for LPR is proposed to use. In addition, a large Chinese license plate dataset containing 10 500 images collected from all 31 provinces in the Chinese mainland is created. This Chinese license plate dataset is named Hefei University of Technology license plate version 1(HFUT-LP v1). Particularly, HFUT-LP v1 dataset is collected in the real ITS monitoring scene. In order to compare the performance of different object detection algorithms for ALPR, a variety of object detection algorithms are used to make a comprehensive performance evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed ALPR system achieves very high accuracy and has very fast processing speed, which is suitable for real-time LPR.