Hybridization of appearance and symmetry for vehicle-logo localization

Vehicle logo detection is of great importance in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications since it augments the traditional License Plate Recognition (LPR) based vehicle identification solutions. An algorithm based on the combination of feature appearance and symmetry is proposed to locate the vehicle logo in a digital image. The air-intake grille, as the most recognizable visual structure in the front view of the vehicle, can be efficiently detected and recognized thereby providing information about relative position of vehicle logos. Symmetry, a widely used feature for analyzing vehicle front-view images, has also been taken into consideration along with grille detection in this paper. This hybrid scheme facilitates more accurate vehicle logo detection rate in comparison with using isolated symmetry (which performs poorly on scenes with complex background) or edge statistics (which cannot handle non/small-grille vehicles). Experimental results on a large number of images validate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.