WheelRight (United Kingdom)

This paper addresses the challenge of reading low contrast text on tyre sidewall images of vehicles in motion. It presents first of its kind, a full scale industrial system which can read tyre codes when installed along driveways such as at gas stations or parking lots with vehicles driving under 10 mph. Tyre circularity is first detected using a circular Hough transform with dynamic radius detection. The detected tyre arches are then unwarped into rectangular patches. A cascade of convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers is then applied for text recognition. Firstly, a novel proposal generator for the code localization is introduced by integrating convolutional layers producing HOG-like (Histogram of Oriented Gradients) features into a CNN. The proposals are then filtered using a deep network. After the code is localized, character detection and recognition are carried out using two separate deep CNNs. The results (accuracy, repeatability and efficiency) are impressive and show promise for the intended application.

This paper presents an industrial system to read text on tire sidewalls. Images of vehicle tires in motion are acquired using roadside cameras. Firstly, the tire circularity is detected using Circular Hough Transform (CHT) with dynamic radius detection. The tire is then unwarped into a rectangular patch and a cascade of convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers is applied for text recognition. We introduce a novel proposal generator for localizing the tire code by combining Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) with a CNN. The proposals are then filtered using a deep network. After the code is localized, character detection and recognition are carried out using two separate deep CNNs. The system presents impressive accuracy and efficiency proving its suitability for the intended industrial application.