Intelligent Image Super-Resolution for Vehicle License Plate in Surveillance Applications

Abstract

Vehicle license plate images are often low resolution and blurry because of the large distance and relative motion between the vision sensor and vehicle, making license plate identification arduous. The extensive use of expensive, high-quality vision sensors is uneconomical in most cases; thus, images are initially captured and then translated from low resolution to high resolution. For this purpose, several traditional techniques such as bilinear, bicubic, super-resolution convolutional neural network, and super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) have been developed over time to upgrade low-quality images. However, most studies in this area pertain to the conversion of low-resolution images to super-resolution images, and little attention has been paid to motion de-blurring. This work extends SRGAN by adding an intelligent motion-deblurring method (termed SRGAN-LP), which helps to enhance the image resolution and remove motion blur from the given images. A comprehensive and new domain-specific dataset was developed to achieve improved results. Moreover, maintaining higher quantitative and qualitative results in comparison to the ground truth images, this study upscales the provided low-resolution image four times and removes the motion blur to a reasonable extent, making it suitable for surveillance applications.