License plate detection based on fully convolutional networks

Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in image semantic segmentation, which is the key work in license plate detection (LPD). An FCN architecture for LPD is presented. First, a multiscale hierarchical network structure is used to combine multiscale and multilevel features produced by FCN. Then, an enhanced loss structure that contains three loss layers is defined to emphasize the license plates in images. Finally, the FCN generates prediction maps that directly show the location of license plates. Experiments show that our approach is more accurate than many state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2017 SPIE and IS&T