Advancing Vehicle Plate Recognition: Multitasking Visual Language Models with VehiclePaliGemma

License plate recognition (LPR) involves automated systems that utilize cameras and computer vision to read vehicle license plates. Such plates collected through LPR can then be compared against databases to identify stolen vehicles, uninsured drivers, crime suspects, and more. The LPR system plays a significant role in saving time for institutions such as the police force. In the past, LPR relied heavily on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which has been widely explored to recognize characters in images. Usually, collected plate images suffer from various limitations, including noise, blurring, weather conditions, and close characters, making the recognition complex. Existing LPR methods still require significant improvement, especially for distorted images. To fill this gap, we propose utilizing visual language models (VLMs) such as OpenAI GPT4o, Google Gemini 1.5, Google PaliGemma (Pathways Language and Image model + Gemma model), Meta Llama 3.2, Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, LLaVA, NVIDIA VILA, and moondream2 to recognize such unclear plates with close characters. This paper evaluates the VLM's capability to address the aforementioned problems. Additionally, we introduce ``VehiclePaliGemma'', a fine-tuned Open-sourced PaliGemma VLM designed to recognize plates under challenging conditions. We compared our proposed VehiclePaliGemma with state-of-the-art methods and other VLMs using a dataset of Malaysian license plates collected under complex conditions. The results indicate that VehiclePaliGemma achieved superior performance with an accuracy of 87.6%. Moreover, it is able to predict the car's plate at a speed of 7 frames per second using A100-80GB GPU. Finally, we explored the multitasking capability of VehiclePaliGemma model to accurately identify plates containing multiple cars of various models and colors, with plates positioned and oriented in different directions.