PGFLP 1.0: Benchmark Suite and Dataset for Automatic License Plate Recognition in the wild

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) is a powerful tool for analyzing the growing number of vehicles in major cities worldwide. However, building datasets that accurately represent vehicles and license plates (LPs) is challenging, as most current datasets are specific to certain countries and do not provide a comprehensive representation. This remains particularly true for French LPs, where there is currently no publicly available dataset that covers a wide range of scenarios such as plate inclinations, varying lighting conditions, and changing weather. To address this issue, we present a benchmark suite called PGFLP 1.0, which includes more than 14k fully annotated LPs from several vehicle categories (e.g. cars, trucks, motorcycles). PGFLP 1.0 includes three annotation levels: rectangular boxes for the LP, four vertices of the LP region, and labels for the full LP sequence. Using PGFLP 1.0, we provide an experimental evaluation of the most recent ALPR approaches, assessing their ability to detect and recognize LPs. This work provides a useful benchmark in terms of accuracy and speed for current and future research efforts in ALPR.