License plate text recognition using deep learning, NLP, and image processing techniques

Abstract

Detecting license plates has never been easy, particularly with the proliferation of sophisticated radars on highways and roads. By 2021, the gendarmerie and National Security Road control agents will have access to more than 1 billion smart traffic radars worldwide. This research presents a revolutionary technique for detecting and recognizing Arabic and Latin license plates. After assembling the gathered images to create a novel dataset, we utilized YOLO v7 to locate and identify the number plate in the image as the first step of the suggested procedure. Before the dataset was fed to the detection system, it was manually labeled. Afterward, we improved the recognized license plate using machine learning methods. To do this, we used kernel methods as well as thresholding to get rid of the extra vertical lines on the plate. After that, we employed Arabic OCR along with Easy OCR methods to decipher the Latin and Arabic characters on the number plate. Eventually, the proposed method achieved an F1 score of 98%,with a precision and recall of 97% and 98%, respectively. We also obtained an accuracy of 99% for image segmentation. The segmentation and detection results from the suggested strategy have shown satisfactory results.