Weighted Edit Distance for Country Code Recognition in License Plates

Kateryna Chumachenko, Alexandros Iosifidis, Moncef Gabbouj

Abstract: This paper presents the problem of country code recognition from li-cense plate images. We propose an approach based on character de-tection and subsequent clustering for country code localization. We further propose three weighted Edit Distance metrics for country of origin prediction from imperfect detections, namely based on char-acter similarity, detection confidence, and relative operation impor-tance. Experimental results show the benefit of proposed approaches on real-world data. The proposed method is lightweight and inde-pendent of the underlying object detector, facilitating its application on edge devices.