Report on ALDPR
Automatic License Plate Detection and
Recognition: A Comparison of Architectures
1 ABSTRACT
Automatic License Plate
Detection and Recognition
systems have become one of the
most progressive areas in the field
of Intelligent Traffic Management
Systems (ITML). So as a result,
there have been quite a lot of
detection and recognition pipelines
that have been touched upon
mildly. This slapdash development
in the technology has led to some
sloppy outputs, thus making the
same a bit unreliable. Further
scrutiny revealed, the detection
pipeline is the most vulnerable
when efficiency is taken into the
question. So, in this paper, we
undertake the burden of finding
the best real-time detection
algorithm coupled with a state of
the art and easy to implement
Recognition pipeline
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2 INTRODUCTION
This is more of a three-part
introduction. We won’t go deeply
into working of the models, but
rather delve into it enough so that
we can understand their
comparisons
These are the models we
took into consideration for the
detection pipeline: -
1. YOLOv4
2. VGG16
These two models employ a
CNN based approach to their
algorithm, which prompted the
need of a non-CNN model to have
a fair comparison. This is where the
inbuilt toolboxes of MATLAB lent
us a huge hand.
For the recognition pipeline
of the CNN models, we just used
the easyOCR library in python,
which does a perfect job.
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3 PROPOSED employ a CNN based algorithm,

and that is what YOLO does too, to
METHODOLOGIES
put it lightly. To understand the
3.1 YOLOV4 working of YOLO, we first need to
It is Common Knowledge any understand the working of the
image detection techniques will single state object detectors

Figure 1

As you can see in Figure 1, In trained using the respective python

single stage, we apply the codes for training and testing
detection head directly on the
Then it is just a simple
feature map
matter of running the detector
Now, to access the features, with local images for detection.
we need a cloud-based IDE,
preferably Google Collab. We will
then clone in a darknet server to
remotely access the detector. We
would recommend mounting the
google drive to facilitate faster
runtime, but using the local
machine will work too, albeit a bit
less smoothly.

Image datasets can then be

zipped and uploaded and can be

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4 MATLAB AND IMAGE
PROCESSING
Unlike the traditional way of
using neural networks for ALDPR,
this method uses image processing
toolbox from MATLAB to process
the image through multiple
number of algorithms to provide an
alpha numeric conversion of the
image into a text format.
The concept we use here for
detecting number plates consists
of three programs,
-Template Creation which
converts images of alphanumeric
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characters and saves them as a
new template in MATLAB memory,
-Letter Detection which reads the
characters from given image and
finds the most matching
alphanumeric characters and
-Plate Detection which processes
the image and calls the above two
programs to detect the characters
in the license plate.
Choosing the image we want
and running the MATLAB code, It
will give us the plate number
within a matter of few seconds
with fair accuracy
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5 VGG16

5.1 STRUCTURAL CONFIGURATION

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5.2 TABULAR COLUMN FOR THE CONFIG

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5.3 SEQUENCES OF STEPS FOR
DETECTION USING VGG-16
• A data set of 433 images and
their pixel size and
segmented coordinates for
the bounding box has been
established.
• An example of bounding box
coordinates has been
accessed and an array of
data are created
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• A VGG 16 based network has
been trained for 80% of the
data and with 50 epochs, the
accuracy varies from 0.36 to
0.94 at the final stages
• Then the remaining 0.2 data
are tested, the final
bounding boxes with images
are displayed from the
trained vgg-16 network.
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6 COMPARISON OF ARCHITECTURES

PIPELINE MODEL TIME FOR EFFICIENCY

OUTPUT

YOLOv4 1.4 sec (without GPU) 91%

0.72 sec (with GPU)

DETECTION

VGG 16 Runs on internet-based 86.21%

notebook, so to train it
takes around 50 mins,
to test around 7ms per
step so 7 seconds for
20% of 433 images

easyOCR 1.6 sec (without GPU) 82%

0.9 sec (with GPU)
RECOGNITION

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ARCHITECTURE TIME FOR EFFICIENCY

OUTPUT

YOLOv4 with easyOCR (single 1.7 sec (without 91%

pipeline) GPU)

1.1 sec (with GPU)

MATLAB 3.8 sec 72%

errors in detection of the

7 INFERENCE
We can clearly see that the
VGG16 model requires retraining of
images, so it becomes obsolete to
go through with it, even though it
has the fastest output.
As the MATLAB model is not
based on a CNN algorithm, but
rather a position based
architecture, it is prone to basic
concerned images. The range of
the license plate in the image is
very important factor and this
impacts the model quite a bit
The YOLOv4 trained
easyOCR model clearly tested out
the charts in terms of detection
and output speed, which gave it an
edge over the other models

8 CONCLUSION
Thus we used a YOLOv4
model with easyOCR for the
ALDPR

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