Robust License Plate Detection Through Auxiliary Information and Context Fusion Model

License plate detection has wide applications in the intelligent transportation system, while it still remains challenges to improve the robustness under various shooting distance and observation angles. To get better performance, a novel convolutional-neural-network-based method is proposed, which is achieved with auxiliary information and context fusion model. First, the auxiliary information is employed in our framework, which corresponds with resolutions, orientations and shapes of license plates. Specifically, the multiple resolutions are collected through integrating multi-level features of convolution hierarchy. Besides the various scales and ratios, the region proposal network (RPN) with multi-angle anchors and branching structure is applied to generate proper proposals. Second, an effective context fusion model is designed to fully exploit the hidden correlation between license plates and contextual properties. The local and contextual features are independently learned in the dual pathways, which are later joint to form a powerful representation in subsequent layers. Comprehensive experiments on the publicly available datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.