License plate recognition using deep learning

In this paper, a method based on deep learning is presented to highlight and recognize the Iranian license plate numbers. The current research uses the convolutional neural network with the encoder-decoder structure to enhance the image and highlight the plate image numbers instead of using traditional image enhancement techniques. The proposed network can highlight vehicle license plate numbers by learning the plate images in various conditions. After that, the plate numbers are recognized from the reproduced image using a recurrent neural network without the need to plate image segmentation. This method can reduce the error caused by the license plate number segmentation. The proposed method reached the final recognition rate up to 94٫19 percent on a database with 4000 test images for recognizing the license plates which is acceptable in comparison to three recent methods.