# Synthesizing Annotated Image and Video Data Using a Rendering-Based Pipeline for Improved License Plate Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14448/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [Learning from Synthetic Data for Crowd Counting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03303/) (2019)
- [Synscapes: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Street Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08705/) (2018)
- [Falling Things: A Synthetic Dataset for 3D Object Detection and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06534/) (2018)
- [A Robust Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Based on the YOLO Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09567/) (2018)
- [A Robust Attentional Framework for License Plate Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03919/) (2020)
- [Benchmark for License Plate Character Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02937/) (2016)
- [Vehicle-Rear: A New Dataset to Explore Feature Fusion for Vehicle Identification Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05541/) (2019)
- [CNN for License Plate Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07873/) (2016)
- [3D Rendering Framework for Data Augmentation in Optical Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14970/) (2022)
- [Iranis: A Large-scale Dataset of Farsi License Plate Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00295/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An insufficient number of training samples is a common problem in neural network applications. While data augmentation methods require at least a minimum number of samples, we propose a novel, rendering-based pipeline for synthesizing annotated data sets. Our method does not modify existing samples but synthesizes entirely new samples. The proposed rendering-based pipeline is capable of generating and annotating synthetic and partly-real image and video data in a fully automatic procedure. Moreover, the pipeline can aid the acquisition of real data. The proposed pipeline is based on a rendering process. This process generates synthetic data. Partly-real data bring the synthetic sequences closer to reality by incorporating real cameras during the acquisition process. The benefits of the proposed data generation pipeline, especially for machine learning scenarios with limited available training data, are demonstrated by an extensive experimental validation in the context of automatic license plate recognition. The experiments demonstrate a significant reduction of the character error rate and miss rate from 73.74% and 100% to 14.11% and 41.27% respectively, compared to an OCR algorithm trained on a real data set solely. These improvements are achieved by training the algorithm on synthesized data solely. When additionally incorporating real data, the error rates can be decreased further. Thereby, the character error rate and miss rate can be reduced to 11.90% and 39.88% respectively. All data used during the experiments as well as the proposed rendering-based pipeline for the automated data generation is made publicly available under (URL will be revealed upon publication).