EQ-LPR: Efficient Quality-Aware License Plate Recognition

License plate recognition (LPR) has attracted considerable attention due to its widespread applications in real life. Although numerous approaches based on image processing have been presented in the past few years, it is still an urgent issue to perform the LPR task efficiently in complex and unconstrained scenarios. To remedy this problem, an efficient quality-aware license plate recognition algorithm is proposed by introducing the siamese networks for plate stream recognition and quality awareness in the traffic videos. Moreover, we explore three progressive architectures for efficient and accurate recognition. Knowledge distillation is adopted to compress the quality awareness network and make it lightweight. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the impressive performance and efficiency of the proposed method.