Abstract
To solve data scarcity, generating Chinese license plates with Generative Adversarial Network becomes an efficient solution. However, many previous methods are proposed to directly generate the whole license plate image, which causes the mutual interference of the foreground text and background. This way, it may cause unclear character strokes and an unreal sense of the overall image. To solve these problems, we propose a robust Chinese license plate generation method by separating the foreground text and background of the license plate to eliminate mutual interference. The proposed method can generate any Chinese license plate image while maintaining the precise character stroke and background of the real license plate. Specifically, we substitute the foreground text of the real license plate with the target text. To provide supervision data for text substitution, we propose to synthesize them via foreground text and background separation. Firstly, we erase the text of the real license plate to obtain the corresponding background image. Secondly, we extract the foreground text of another real license plate and merge it with the background obtained above. Qualitative and quantitative experiments verify that the license plates generated by our method are more homogeneous with the real license plates. Besides, we enhance license plate recognition performance with the generated license plates, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed method. Moreover, we release a generated dataset (https://github.com/ICIG2021-187) with 1,000 license plates for each province, including all 31 provinces of the Chinese mainland.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arjovsky, M., Chintala, S., Bottou, L.: Wasserstein generative adversarial networks. In: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), vol. 70, pp. 214–223. PMLR, Sydney, NSW, Australia (2017)
Baek, J., et al.: What is wrong with scene text recognition model comparisons? dataset and model analysis. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 4715–4723. IEEE, Seoul, Korea (South) (2019)
Goodfellow, I.J., et al.: Generative adversarial networks. CoRR abs/1406.2661 (2014)
Gulrajani, I., Ahmed, F., Arjovsky, M., Dumoulin, V., Courville, A.: Improved training of wasserstein gans. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5767–5777. Long Beach, CA, USA (2017)
Gupta, A., Vedaldi, A., Zisserman, A.: Synthetic data for text localisation in natural images. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 2315–2324. IEEE, Las Vegas, NV, USA (2016)
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 770–778. IEEE, Las Vegas, NV, USA (2016)
Huang, J., et al.: Research on vehicle license plate data generation in complex environment based on generative adversarial network. In: 11th International Conference on Digital Image Processing (ICDIP), vol. 11179, p. 1117932. International Society for Optics and Photonics (2019)
Isola, P., Zhu, J.Y., Zhou, T., Efros, A.A.: Image-to-image translation with conditional adversarial networks. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 1125–1134. IEEE, Honolulu, HI, USA (2017)
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. In: 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), San Diego, CA, USA (2015)
Milletari, F., Navab, N., Ahmadi, S., V-net: Fully convolutional neural networks for volumetric medical image segmentation. In: 4th International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pp. 565–571. IEEE, Stanford, CA, USA (2016)
Mirza, M., Osindero, S.: Conditional generative adversarial nets. CoRR abs/1411.1784 (2014)
Radford, A., Metz, L., Chintala, S.: Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks. In: 4th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016)
Redmon, J., Farhadi, A.: Yolov3: An incremental improvement. CoRR abs/1804.02767 (2018)
Sun, M., Zhou, F., Yang, C., Yin, X.: Image generation framework for unbalanced license plate data set. In: Neural Information Processing - 26th International Conference (ICONIP), vol. 1143, pp. 127–134. Springer, Sydney, NSW, Australia (2019)
Wang, X., You, M., Shen, C.: Adversarial generation of training examples for vehicle license plate recognition. CoRR abs/1707.03124 (2017)
Wu, C., Xu, S., Song, G., Zhang, S.: How many labeled license plates are needed? In: Lai, J.-H., Liu, C.-L., Chen, X., Zhou, J., Tan, T., Zheng, N., Zha, H. (eds.) PRCV 2018. LNCS, vol. 11259, pp. 334–346. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03341-5_28
Wu, L., Zhang, C., Liu, J., Han, J., Liu, J., Ding, E., Bai, X.: Editing text in the wild. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 1500–1508. ACM, Nice, France (2019)
Zhang, L., Wang, P., Li, H., Li, Z., Shen, C., Zhang, Y.: A robust attentional framework for license plate recognition in the wild. CoRR abs/2006.03919 (2020)
Zhang, S., Liu, Y., Jin, L., Huang, Y., Lai, S.: Ensnet: ensconce text in the wild. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 33, pp. 801–808. AAAI, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (2019)
Zhao, Y., Yu, Z., Li, X., Cai, M.: Chinese license plate image database building methodology for license plate recognition. J. Electron. Imaging 28(1), 013001 (2019)
Zhu, J.Y., Park, T., Isola, P., Efros, A.A.: Unpaired image-to-image translation using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. In: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 2242–2251. IEEE, Venice, Italy (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sun, YF., Liu, Q., Chen, SL., Zhou, F., Yin, XC. (2021). Robust Chinese License Plate Generation via Foreground Text and Background Separation. In: Peng, Y., Hu, SM., Gabbouj, M., Zhou, K., Elad, M., Xu, K. (eds) Image and Graphics. ICIG 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12890. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87361-5_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87361-5_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87360-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87361-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)