# A New Hybrid Model of Generative Adversarial Network and You Only Look Once Algorithm for Automatic License-Plate Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06868/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [Learning to Deblur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.7444/) (2014)
- [A Robust Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Based on the YOLO Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09567/) (2018)
- [Benchmark for License Plate Character Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02937/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic License-Plate Recognition (ALPR) plays a pivotal role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) as a fundamental element of Smart Cities. However, due to its high variability, ALPR faces challenging issues more efficiently addressed by deep learning techniques. In this paper, a selective Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is proposed for deblurring in the preprocessing step, coupled with the state-of-the-art You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO)v5 object detection architectures for License-Plate Detection (LPD), and the integrated Character Segmentation (CS) and Character Recognition (CR) steps. The selective preprocessing bypasses unnecessary and sometimes counter-productive input manipulations, while YOLOv5 LPD/CS+CR delivers high accuracy and low computing cost. As a result, YOLOv5 achieves a detection time of 0.026 seconds for both LP and CR detection stages, facilitating real-time applications with exceptionally rapid responsiveness. Moreover, the proposed model achieves accuracy rates of 95% and 97% in the LPD and CR detection phases, respectively. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Deblur-GAN pre-processor significantly improves detection accuracy by nearly 40%, especially when encountering blurred License Plates (LPs).To train and test the learning components, we generated and publicly released our blur and ALPR datasets (using Iranian license plates as a use-case), which are more representative of close-to-real-life ad-hoc situations. The findings demonstrate that employing the state-of-the-art YOLO model results in excellent overall precision and detection time, making it well-suited for portable applications. Additionally, integrating the Deblur-GAN model as a preliminary processing step enhances the overall effectiveness of our comprehensive model, particularly when confronted with blurred scenes captured by the camera as input.