Towards Ship License Plate Recognition in the Wild: A Large Benchmark and Strong Baseline

Abstract The paper targets the challenging task of Ship License Plate (SLP) recognition. Existing methods for SLP recognition are hampered by the scarcity of large and publicly available datasets, leading to evaluations on small and non-representative datasets. To alleviate it, we have built a large dataset, called SLP34K, which consists of 34,385 images collected by an intelligent traffic surveillance system. The dataset is carefully manually annotated with text labels and attributes, and presents high data diversity by multiple installation locations and long capturing period of the cameras. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective SLP recognition baseline method. The baseline is equipped with a strong visual encoder that benefits from initial pre-training via self-supervised learning, followed by further refinement through our devised semantic enhancement module. Extensive experiments on SLP34K verify the effectiveness of our proposed baseline. Moreover, while our baseline is designed for SLP recognition, it can also be used for common scene text recognition and achieve state-of-the-art performance on seven mainstream scene text recognition datasets.