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.

Neural Network-Powered License Plate Recognition System Design

The development of scientific inquiry and research has yielded numerous benefits in the realm of intelligent traffic control systems, particularly in the realm of automatic license plate recognition for vehicles. The design of license plate recognition algorithms has undergone digitalization through the utilization of neural networks. In contemporary times, there is a growing demand for vehicle surveillance due to the need for efficient vehicle processing and traffic management. The design, development, and implementation of a license plate recognition system hold significant social, economic, and academic importance. The study aims to present contemporary methodologies and empirical findings pertaining to automated license plate recognition. The primary focus of the automatic license plate recognition algorithm was on image extraction, character segmentation, and recognition. The task of character segmentation has been identified as the most challenging function based on my observations. The license plate recognition project that we designed demonstrated the effectiveness of this method across various observed conditions. Particularly in low-light environments, such as during periods of limited illumination or inclement weather characterized by precipitation. The method has been subjected to testing using a sample size of fifty images, resulting in a 100% accuracy rate. The findings of this study demonstrate the project’s ability to effectively determine the optimal outcomes of simulations.

Super-resolution reconstruction for license plate images of moving vehicles

A novel reconstruction method to improve the recognition of license plate texts of moving vehicles in real traffic videos is proposed, which fuses complimentary information among low resolution （LR） images to yield a high resolution （HR） image. Based on the regularization super-resolution （SR） reconstruction schemes, this paper first introduces a residual gradient （RG） term as a new regularization term to improve the quality of the reconstructed image. Moreover, L1 norm is used to measure the residual data （RD） term and the RG term in order to improve the robustness of the proposed method. Finally, the steepest descent method is exploited to solve the energy functional. Simulated and real acquired video sequence experiments show the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method and demonstrate its superiority over the bi-cubic interpolation and discontinuity adaptive Markov random field （DAMRF） SR method in both signal to noise ratios （SNR） and visual effects.

Vehicle detection based on information fusion of vehicle symmetrical contour and license plate position

An efficient vehicle detection approach is proposed for traffic surveillance images, which is based on information fusion of vehicle symmetrical contour and license plate position. The vertical symmetry axis of the vehicle contour in an image is. first detected, and then the vertical and the horizontal symmetry axes of the license plate are detected using the symmetry axis of the vehicle contour as a reference. The vehicle location in an image is determined using license plate symmetry axes and the vertical and the horizontal projection maps of the vehicle edge image. A dataset consisting of 450 images （15 classes of vehicles） is used to test the proposed method. The experimental results indicate that compared with the vehicle contour-based, the license plate location-based, the vehicle texture-based and the Gabor feature-based methods, the proposed method is the best with a detection accuracy of 90.7% and an elapsed time of 125 ms.

Vehicle License Plate Character Segmentation

Vehicle license plate (VLP) character segmentation is an important part of the vehicle license plate recognition system (VLPRS).This paper proposes a least square method (LSM) to treat horizontal tilt and vertical tilt in VLP images.Auxiliary lines are added into the image (or the tilt-corrected image) to make the separated parts of each Chinese character to be an interconnected region.The noise regions will be eliminated after two fusing images are merged according to the minimum principle of gray values. Then,the characters are segmented by projection method (PM) and the final character images are obtained.The experimental results show that this method features fast processing and good performance in segmentation.

Automatic Vehicle License Plate Recognition Using Optimal Deep Learning Model

The latest advancements in highway research domain and increase in the number of vehicles everyday led to wider exposure and attention towards the development of efficient Intelligent Transportation System(ITS).One of the popular research areas i.e.,Vehicle License Plate Recognition(VLPR)aims at determining the characters that exist in the license plate of the vehicles.The VLPR process is a difficult one due to the differences in viewpoint,shapes,colors,patterns,and non-uniform illumination at the time of capturing images.The current study develops a robust Deep Learning(DL)-based VLPR model using Squirrel Search Algorithm(SSA)-based Convolutional Neural Network(CNN),called the SSA-CNN model.The presented technique has a total of four major processes namely preprocessing,License Plate(LP)localization and detection,character segmentation,and recognition.Hough Transform(HT)is applied as a feature extractor and SSA-CNN algorithm is applied for character recognition in LP.The SSA-CNN method effectively recognizes the characters that exist in the segmented image by optimal tuning of CNN parameters.The HT-SSA-CNN model was experimentally validated using the Stanford Car,FZU Car,and HumAIn 2019 Challenge datasets.The experimentation outcome verified that the presented method was better under several aspects.The projected HT-SSA-CNN model implied the best performance with optimal overall accuracy of 0.983%.

Research and Implementation of a License Plate Recognition Algorithm Based on Hierarchical Classification

This paper proposed an improved method for license plate recognition based on hierarchical classification. First, the method of feature extraction and dimension reduction is presented by finding the optimal wavelet packet basis in the process of wavelet packet decomposition and K-L transform. Then the recognition algorithm is introduced based on feature extraction and hierarchical classification. Finally, the principles and procedures of using support vector machines, Harris corner detection algorithm and digital character classification are explained in detail. Simulation results indicate that the presented recognition algorithm performs well with higher speed and efficiency in recognition.

YOLO and Blockchain Technology Applied to Intelligent Transportation License Plate Character Recognition for Security

Privacy and trust are significant issues in intelligent transportation systems(ITS).Data security is critical in ITS systems since sensitive user data is communicated to another user over the internet through wireless devices and routes such as radio channels,optical fiber,and blockchain technology.The Internet of Things(IoT)is a network of connected,interconnected gadgets.Privacy issues occasionally arise due to the amount of data generated.However,they have been primarily addressed by blockchain and smart contract technology.While there are still security issues with smart contracts,primarily due to the complexity of writing the code,there are still many challenges to consider when designing blockchain designs for the IoT environment.This study uses traditional blockchain technology with the“You Only Look Once”(YOLO)object detection method to accurately locate and identify license plates.While YOLO and blockchain technologies used for intelligent vehicle license plate recognition are promising,they have received limited research attention.Real-time object identification and recognition would be possible by combining a cutting-edge object detection technique with a regional convolutional neural network(RCNN)built with the tensor flow core open source libraries.This method works reasonably well for identifying any license plate.The Automatic License Plate Recognition(ALPR)approach delivered outstanding results in various datasets.First,with a recognition rate of 96.2%,our system(UFPR-ALPR)surpassed the previously used technology,consisting of 4500 frames and around 150 films.Second,a deep learning algorithm was trained to recognize images of license plate numbers using the UFPR-ALPR dataset.Third,the license plate’s characters were complicated for standard methods to identify because of the shifting lighting correctly.The proposed model,however,produced beneficial outcomes.

License Plate Recognition for Parking Control System by Mathematical Morphology

Nowadays, license plate recognition for parking systems is a critical task to provide automatic control of customers and payment. This paper introduces a new method for automatic recognition of license plates of vehicles by mathematical morphology. The proposed method can provide the license plate number of the plates in different light conditions, colors, sizes, and inclination （angles）. The algorithm can recognize the license plates of European Union vehicles quickly and correctly. The pattern learning of mathematical skeletons has high efficiency in the process. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated well by the test in a parking control system.

License Plate Recognition via Attention Mechanism

License plate recognition technology use widely in intelligent trafficmanagement and control. Researchers have been committed to improving thespeed and accuracy of license plate recognition for nearly 30 years. This paperis the first to propose combining the attention mechanism with YOLO-v5and LPRnet to construct a new license plate recognition model (LPR-CBAMNet).Through the attention mechanism CBAM(Convolutional Block AttentionModule), the importance of different feature channels in license platerecognition can be re-calibrated to obtain proper attention to features. Forceinformation to achieve the purpose of improving recognition speed andaccuracy. Experimental results show that the model construction methodis superior in speed and accuracy to traditional license plate recognitionalgorithms. The accuracy of the recognition model of the CBAM model isincreased by two percentage points to 97.2%, and the size of the constructedmodel is only 1.8 M, which can meet the requirements of real-time executionof embedded low-power devices. The codes for training and evaluating LPRCBAM-Net are available under the open-source MIT License at: https://github.com/To2rk/LPR-CBAM-Net.

Deep Learning Based License Plate Number Recognition for Smart Cities

Smart city-aspiring urban areas should have a number of necessary elements in place to achieve the intended objective.Precise controlling and management of traffic conditions,increased safety and surveillance,and enhanced incident avoidance and management should be top priorities in smart city management.At the same time,Vehicle License Plate Number Recognition(VLPNR)has become a hot research topic,owing to several real-time applications like automated toll fee processing,traffic law enforcement,private space access control,and road traffic surveillance.Automated VLPNR is a computer vision-based technique which is employed in the recognition of automobiles based on vehicle number plates.The current research paper presents an effective Deep Learning(DL)-based VLPNR called DLVLPNR model to identify and recognize the alphanumeric characters present in license plate.The proposed model involves two main stages namely,license plate detection and Tesseract-based character recognition.The detection of alphanumeric characters present in license plate takes place with the help of fast RCNN with Inception V2 model.Then,the characters in the detected number plate are extracted using Tesseract Optical Character Recognition(OCR)model.The performance of DL-VLPNR model was tested in this paper using two benchmark databases,and the experimental outcome established the superior performance of the model compared to other methods.

Adversarial Attacks on License Plate Recognition Systems

The license plate recognition system(LPRS)has been widely adopted in daily life due to its efficiency and high accuracy.Deep neural networks are commonly used in the LPRS to improve the recognition accuracy.However,researchers have found that deep neural networks have their own security problems that may lead to unexpected results.Specifically,they can be easily attacked by the adversarial examples that are generated by adding small perturbations to the original images,resulting in incorrect license plate recognition.There are some classic methods to generate adversarial examples,but they cannot be adopted on LPRS directly.In this paper,we modify some classic methods to generate adversarial examples that could mislead the LPRS.We conduct extensive evaluations on the HyperLPR system and the results show that the system could be easily attacked by such adversarial examples.In addition,we show that the generated images could also attack the black-box systems;we show some examples that the Baidu LPR system also makes incorrect recognitions.We hope this paper could help improve the LPRS by realizing the existence of such adversarial attacks.

A novel license plate recognition method using HTD and VTD features

In this paper, a novel method of licence plate recognition (LPR) using the vertical traverse density (VTD) and horizontal traverse density (HTD) is presented. The neutral network algorithm using VTD and HTD features is also an innovation. In addition, a so called secondary recognition method which splits characters into different parts is developed. Experimental results show that it is a simple and fast algorithm, which meets the request of real time and nicety performances of LPR and thus has applied value in intelligence transportation system (ITS).

An Efficient Method for Vehicle License Plate Detection in Complex Scenes

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for license plate localization in the images with various situations and complex background. At the first, in order to reduce problems such as low quality and low contrast in the vehicle images, image contrast is enhanced by the two different methods and the best for following is selected. At the second part, vertical edges of the enhanced image are extracted by sobel mask. Then the most of the noise and background edges are removed by an effective algorithm. The output of this stage is given to a morphological filtering to extract the candidate regions and finally we use several geometrical features such as area of the regions, aspect ratio and edge density to eliminate the non-plate regions and segment the plate from the input car image. This method is performed on some real images that have been captured at the different imaging conditions. The appropriate experimental results show that our proposed method is nearly independent to environmental conditions such as lightening, camera angles and camera distance from the automobile, and license plate rotation.

Libyan Licenses Plate Recognition Using Template Matching Method

License plate recognition (LPR) applies image processing and character recognition technology to identify vehicles by automatically reading their license plates. The work presented in this paper aims to create a computer vision system capable of taking real-time input image from a static camera and identifying the license plate from extracted image. This problem is examined in two stages: First the license plate region detection and extraction from background and plate segmentation to sub-images, and second the character recognition stage. The method used for the license plate region detection is based on the assumption that the license plate area is a high concentration of smaller details, making it a region of high intensity of edges. The Sobel filter and their vertical and horizontal projections are used to identify the plate region. The result of testing this stage was an accuracy of 67.5%. The final stage of the LPR system is optical character recognition (OCR). The method adopted for this stage is based on template matching using correlation. Testing the performance of OCR resulted in an overall recognition rate of 87.76%.

Research and Implementation for License Plate Recognition Based on Improved Projection Algorithm

This paper analyzes and dissertates the discrete wavelet transform and improved projection algorithm in four kernel stages （image preprocessing, license plate localization, character segmentation, license plate recognition, i.e.） of license plate recognition system in detail. At last, it gives some conclusions and suggestions on future research.

A Practical Method of Car License Plate Character Segmentation Based on Morphology and Labeling

In this paper, a kind of practical image segmentation algorithm for segment characters from car license plate is presented, based on morphology and labeling. First by morphological operation, noise in the binary image of license plate can be greatly decreased. Then, by labeling, each connected pixel component is given a unique label. Finally, by the known data of license plate, each character is extracted correctly. The advantage of this method is that it can deal with plates with different sizes and connected characters plates, and inclined plates. The experiment results show that it is an effective way to extract characters from the license plate, and can be put into practical use.

Does driving-day-based tradable credit scheme outperform license plate rationing? Examination considering transaction cost

This article models a novel driving-day-based tradable credit scheme (DD-TCS) to alleviate urban traffic congestion. In this model, car-using allowances (in terms of the number of days in a month, termed as "credit") are freely and uniformly allocated to all travellers, who are also allowed to trade them in a market according to his/her travel needs (e.g. driving more or fewer days than the free endowment). As opposed to most studies on TCS, this paper explicitly considers the transaction cost (e.g. infor-mation cost of finding potential traders) in the trading market. To assess the feasibility of DD-TCS, we compare it against the license plate rationing (LPR) scheme, which has been practically implemented in many cities such as Beijing and Chengdu in China. Taking the performance of LPR as a benchmark, we quantify the threshold values of the transaction cost in DD-TCS when the two schemes yield equivalent performance (in terms of the total gener-alized cost). In numerical studies, we also compare the DD-TCS and LPR with the no-action case and the congestion pricing case (representing the theoretical optimum). Results show that both DD-TCS and LPR outperform the no-action case under certain conditions. With small trans-action cost, DD-TCS may achieve a lower system cost that can be very close to the ideal optimum. In addition, parameter analysis shows that DD-TCS performs better than LPR in a wide range of transaction cost, where the threshold values appear to account for a considerable portion of the auto travel time. This implies that DD-TCS will be more appealing than LPR in practice because a transaction cost lower than the extremely large threshold values can be easily achieved for the trading market, e.g. via a mobile platform and modern communication techniques.

Multi-Object Detection of Chinese License Plate in Complex Scenes

Multi-license plate detection in complex scenes is still a challenging task because of multiple vehicle license plates with different sizes and classes in the images having complex background.The edge features of high-density distribution and the high curvature features of stroke turning of Chinese character are important signs to distinguish Chinese license plate from other objects.To accurately detect multiple vehicle license plates with different sizes and classes in complex scenes,a multi-object detection of Chinese license plate method based on improved YOLOv3 network was proposed in this research.The improvements include replacing the residual block of the YOLOv3 backbone network with the Inception-ResNet-A block,imbedding the SPP block into the detection network,cutting the redundant Inception-ResNet-A block to suit for the multi-license plate detection task,and clustering the ground truth boxes of license plates to obtain a new set of anchor boxes.A Chinese vehicle license plate image dataset was built for training and testing the improved network,and the location and class of the license plates in each image were accurately labeled.The dataset has 62,153 pieces of images and 4 classes of China vehicle license plates,almost images have multiple license plates with different sizes.Experiments demonstrated that the multilicense plate detection method obtained 83.4%mAP,98.88%precision,98.17%recall,98.52 F1 score,89.196 BFLOPS and 22 FPS on the test dataset,and whole performance was better than the other five compared networks including YOLOv3,SSD,Faster-RCNN,EfficientDet and RetinaNet.

A Design Flow for Robust License Plate Localization and Recognition in Complex Scenes

In this paper, we present a new design flow for robust license plate localization and recognition. The algorithm consists of three stages: 1) license plate localization;2) character segmentation;and 3) feature extraction and character recognition. The algorithm uses Mexican hat operator for edge detection and Euler number of a binary image for identifying the license plate region. A pre-processing step using median filter and contrast enhancement is employed to improve the character segmentation performance in case of low resolution and blur images. A unique feature vector comprised of region properties, projection data and reflection symmetry coefficient has been proposed. Back propagation artificial neural network classifier has been used to train and test the neural network based on the extracted feature. A thorough testing of algorithm is performed on a database with varying test cases in terms of illumination and different plate conditions. Practical considerations like existence of another text block in an image, presence of dirt or shadow on or near license plate region, license plate with rows of characters and sensitivity to license plate dimensions have been addressed. The results are encouraging with success rate of 98.10% for license plate localization and 97.05% for character recognition.