Algorithmic pipeline and general principles of cost-efficient automatic plate recognition system for resource-constrained embedded devices

A method for recognizing a license plate number on an image, comprising the following steps:

• detecting a license plate on a vehicle in the image;
• recognizing characters on the license plate and coordinates of the characters by a neural network, wherein a loss function of the neural network consists of classification loss, confidence loss and Complete Intersection over Union (CIOU) loss;
• and
• organizing the recognized characters based on the coordinates to form the recognized license plate number,
• wherein the detecting step, the recognizing step and the organizing step are performed on each of multiple images from adjacent frames in a video about the vehicle, to form multiple license plate numbers, and the method further comprising:
• assigning all license plate numbers that have a low edit-distance from the multiple license plate numbers to a cluster;
• and
• choosing the license plate number which occurs most often in the cluster as the recognized license plate number.