Advancing Multinational License Plate Recognition Through Synthetic and Real Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Evaluation

ABSTRACT Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) is a frequent research topic due to its wide‐ranging practical applications. While recent studies use synthetic images to improve license plate recognition (LPR) results, there remain several limitations in these efforts. This work addresses these constraints by comprehensively exploring the integration of real and synthetic data to enhance LPR performance. We subject 16 optical character recognition (OCR) models to a benchmarking process involving 12 public datasets acquired from various regions. Several key findings emerge from our investigation. Primarily, the massive incorporation of synthetic data substantially boosts model performance in both intra‐ and cross‐dataset scenarios. We examine three distinct methodologies for generating synthetic data: template‐based generation, character permutation, and utilizing a generative adversarial network (GAN) model, each contributing significantly to performance enhancement. The combined use of these methodologies demonstrates a notable synergistic effect, leading to end‐to‐end results that surpass those reached by state‐of‐the‐art methods and established commercial systems. Our experiments also underscore the efficacy of synthetic data in mitigating challenges posed by limited training data, enabling remarkable results to be achieved even with small fractions of the original training data. Finally, we investigate the trade‐off between accuracy and speed among different models, identifying those that strike the optimal balance in each intra‐dataset and cross‐dataset settings.