Chinese License Plate Character Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network

Chinese license plate character recognition is a difficult problem because of ambient lighting conditions, and the images are usually noisy, broken or incomplete. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network architecture to solve this problem. The converlutional neural network performs very well: the recognition rate on the dataset we collected from real scene achieved 98.36% and the recognition time of one hundred characters only 0.159 second. We also compared the results of different feature map number of C5 layer's and get some useful suggestions on the design of convolutional neural network.