# HAT Super-Resolution and a PARSeq+CLIP4STR Voting Ensemble for Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08896 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08896/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 6 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [CLIP4STR: A Simple Baseline for Scene Text Recognition with Pre-trained Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14014/) (2023)
- [SwiftSRGAN -- Rethinking Super-Resolution for Efficient and Real-time Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14320/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We describe our entry to the ICIP 2026 Grand Challenge on Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Super-Resolution (XLPSR), which scored 9.73 wECR on the public validation leaderboard. The system pairs a Hybrid Attention Transformer super-resolution (HAT) front-end with an ensemble of two scene-text recognisers (PARSeq-S and CLIP4STR-B) and a confidence-weighted character-voting scheme that abstains on uncertain positions. We treat XLPSR as a recognition task gated by image legibility: the SR step exists to lift characters out of sub-pixel territory, and the asymmetric scoring rule (+2 / -1 / 0) is exploited explicitly through abstention. Our pipeline runs in 1.7 s per sequence on RTX 3090 (max 2.7 s, p99 2.4 s), well under the 60 s/sequence Docker budget.