Artificial Mercosur license plates dataset

Gilles Velleneuve Trindade Silvano; Ivanovitch Silva; Vinícius Campos Tinoco Ribeiro; Vitor Rodrigues Greati; Aguinaldo Bezerra; Patrícia Takako Endo; Theo Lynn

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2020.106554

Artificial Mercosur license plates dataset

Data Brief. 2020 Dec 5:33:106554. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.106554. eCollection 2020 Dec.

Authors

Gilles Velleneuve Trindade Silvano¹, Ivanovitch Silva¹, Vinícius Campos Tinoco Ribeiro¹, Vitor Rodrigues Greati¹, Aguinaldo Bezerra¹, Patrícia Takako Endo², Theo Lynn³

Affiliations

¹ Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.
² Universidade de Pernambuco (UPE), Pernambuco, Brazil.
³ Irish Institute of Digital Business, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.

Abstract

Mercosur (a.k.a. Mercosul) is a trade bloc comprising five South American countries. In 2018, a unified Mercosur license plate model was rolled out. Access to large volumes of ground truth Mercosur license plates with sufficient presentation variety is a significant challenge for training supervised models for license plate detection (LPD) in automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems. To address this problem, a Mercosur license plate generator was developed to generate artificial license plate images meeting the new standard with sufficient variety for ALPR training purposes. This includes images with variation due to occlusions and environmental conditions. An embedded system was developed for detecting legacy license plates in images of real scenarios and overwriting these with artificially generated Mercosur license plates. This data set comprises 3,829 images of vehicles with synthetic license plates that meet the new Mercosur standard in real scenarios, and equivalent number of text files containing label information for the images, all organized in a CSV file with compiled image file paths and associated labels.

Keywords: Automated license plate recognition license; Deep Learning; License plates images; Mercosur license plates; Number Plate Detection; Plate detection; Smart Cities; Synthetic Data.