A New Image Enhancement and Super Resolution technique for license plate recognition

License Plate Recognition (LPR) is an important implemented application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning in the past decades. However, due to the low image quality caused by the fast movement of vehicles and low-quality analogue cameras, many plate numbers cannot be recognised accurately by LPR models. To solve this issue, we propose a new deep learning architecture called D_GAN_ESR (Double Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Enhancement and Super Resolution) used for effective image denoising and super-resolution for license plate images. In this paper, we show the limitation of the existing networks for image enhancement and image super-resolution. Furthermore, a feature-based evaluation metric called Peak Signal to Noise Ratio Features (PSNR-F) is used to evaluate and compare performance between different methods. It is shown that the use of PSNR-F has a better performance indicator than the classical PSNR-pixel-to-pixel (PSNR-pixel) evaluation metric. The results show that using D_GAN_ESR to enhance the license plate images increases the LPR accuracy from 30% to 78% when blur images are used and increases the accuracy from 59% to 74.5% when low-quality images are used.