An Improved Visual Attention Model for Automated Vehicle License Plate Number Recognition Using Computer Vision

The role of an automatic licensed plate detection system (ALPDS) cannot be over-emphasized in the world today. The need for an automated system for vehicle license plate number recognition is important for security challenges. Therefore, this paper provides a smart system for vehicle license number recognition using Computer Vision. The system was trained using images of vehicles license numbers as training data. The training images were first annotated using the Visual Graphic Generator (VGG) annotation tool, after the annotation process, the trained images were pre-processed using the OpenCV library for conversion and masking of images. TesseractOCR was then used in extracting just texts from the images. The pre-processed and segmented images were then used in training the Mask R-CNN from a pre-trained weight. The result of the proposed system shows how the Mask R-CNN model was trained in ten training steps. The mask R-CNN model obtained accuracy and a loss value for each training step. The mask R-CNN model was evaluated using both training and test data. For the training and testing data, the Mask R-CNN was evaluated in terms of accuracy and loss. The evaluation was done using graphs. The results from the graph show that the Mask R-CNN had a better accuracy result in both training and testing data. The accuracy for training data was that of 95.25% and the accuracy for the testing data was 97.69%. For real-time vehicle license plate number recognition, we deployed our proposed model to the web. Here, we built a web application that allows real-time surveillance video.  Our model was tested on different vehicles in the car park. The result of the mask R-CNN on the test shows how the Mask R-CNN model was used in not just capturing and extracting the vehicle’s license plate number but predicting the characters that appeared on the vehicle’s license plate number. We also compared our proposed system with another existing system. The comparison was done in terms of accuracy, loss, and precision. The result of our proposed model gave us an accuracy of 97.69%, which is higher than the existing system (85%). This study can further be improved by using the Internet of Things in performing live video streaming and also providing a database system that will be storing the predicted vehicle numbers for cars that are detected.