Blurred License Plate Recognition based on single snapshot from drive recorder

Nowadays, drive recorders are becoming a popular form of evidences used by drivers and accepted by court. One common investigation task is to identify vehicles of interest and recognize their license plates (LPs). In this paper, we focus on License Plate Recognition (LPR) based on single snapshot from a drive recorder. As drive recorders are installed on moving vehicles, snapshots by drive recorders usually suffer from serious blur, and the key issue is recognizing the Blurred License Plate (BLP) from single image. A straightforward method is first deblurring the BLP and then recognizing it. However, the first problem with this method is that general image deblurring methods are designed to get a good overall visual effect and the deblurred results may be not good for LPR. The second problem is that general image deblurring methods don´t use the features of the LPs, which could be important priors for the deblurring process. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a novel method that integrates deblurring and recognizing in a closed-loop. The proposed method utilizes characters and patterns of LPs as priors, and the deblurring and recognizing process will stop when a reliable recognition result is obtained from the deblurred image. Furthermore, by analyzing the features of BLPs, this paper proposes a ℓ0-norm based deblurring method. Experiments show that, compared to other LPR methods, the proposed method can achieve higher recognition rate on the BLPs.