BLPnet: A New DNN model for Automatic License Plate Detection with Bengali OCR

Deep Neural Network (DNN) models with image processing and object localization have the potential to advance the automatic traffic control and monitoring system. Despite some notable progress in developing robust license plate detection models, research endeavours continue to reduce computational complexities with higher detection accuracy. This paper reports a computationally efficient and reasonably accurate Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system for Bengali characters with a new DNN model that we call Bengali License Plate Network (BLPnet). Additionally, the cascaded architectures for detecting vehicle regions prior to VLP in the proposed model, would significantly reduce computational cost and false-positives making the system faster and more accurate. Besides, with a new Bengali OCR engine and word-mapping process, the model can readily extract, detect and output the complete license-plate number of a vehicle. The model feeding with17 frames per second (fps) on real-time video footage can detect a vehicle with the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.0152, and the mean license plate character recognition accuracy of 95%. While compared to the other models, an improvement of 5% and 20% were recorded for the BLPnet over the prominent YOLO-based ALPR model and Tesseract model for the number-plate detection accuracy and time requirement, respectively.