Malaysian car plate localization using region-based convolutional neural network

Tay Eng Liang (Intel Microelectronics (M) Sdn. Bhd)
Usman Ullah Sheikh (Universiti Teknologi Malaysia)
Mohd Norzali Haji Mohd (Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia)

Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
Vol 9, No 1: February 2020

Automatic car plate localization and recognition system is a system that identifies the car plate location and recognizes the characters on the car plate input images. Within the automated system, the car plate localization stage is the first stage and is the most crucial stage as the success rate of the whole system depends heavily on it. In this paper, a Malaysian car plate localization system using Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) is proposed. Using transfer learning on the AlexNet CNN, the localization was greatly improved achieving best precision and recall rate of 95.19% and 97.84% respectively. Besides, the proposed R-CNN was able to localize car plates in complex scenarios such as under occlusion.