DCNN based Real-time Adaptive Ship License Plate Recognition (DRASLPR)

Ship license plate recognition is challenging due to the diversity of plate locations and text types. This paper proposes a DCNN-based (deep convolutional neural network) online adaptive real-time ship license plate recognition approach, namely, DRASLPR, which consists of three steps. First, it uses a Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) to detect a ship. Then, it detects the ship license plate with a designed detector. Third, DRASLPR recognizes the ship license plate. The proposed DRASLPR has been deployed at Dongying Port, China and the running results show the effectiveness of DRASLPR.