FF-LPD: A Real-Time Frame-by-Frame License Plate Detector With Knowledge Distillation and Feature Propagation

With the increasing availability of cameras in vehicles, obtaining license plate (LP) information via on-board cameras has become feasible in traffic scenarios. LPs play a pivotal role in vehicle identification, making automatic LP detection (ALPD) a crucial area within traffic analysis. Recent advancements in deep learning have spurred a surge of studies in ALPD. However, the computational limitations of on-board devices hinder the performance of real-time ALPD systems for moving vehicles. Therefore, we propose a real-time frame-by-frame LP detector focusing on real-time accurate LP detection. Specifically, video frames are categorized into keyframes and non-keyframes. Keyframes are processed by a deeper network (high-level stream), while non-keyframes are handled by a lightweight network (low-level stream), significantly enhancing efficiency. To achieve accurate detection, we design a knowledge distillation strategy to boost the performance of low-level stream and a feature propagation method to introduce the temporal clues in video LP detection. Our contributions are: (1) A real-time frame-by-frame LP detector for video LP detection is proposed, achieving a competitive performance with popular one-stage LP detectors. (2) A simple feature-based knowledge distillation strategy is introduced to improve the low-level stream performance. (3) A spatial-temporal attention feature propagation method is designed to refine the features from non-keyframes guided by the memory features from keyframes, leveraging the inherent temporal correlation in videos. The ablation studies show the effectiveness of knowledge distillation strategy and feature propagation method.