MDCA Plate: A Two Stage License Plate Recognition System with Channel Attention and Multi-Dilation Features
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traffic imagery from the wild contains small plates, blur, glare, dirt, and occlusion, which makes license plate recognition difficult. We present MDCA Plate, a two stage system that detects plates with YOLOv8 and recognizes cropped plates with a PaddleOCR based recognizer enhanced by two modules. The first module is a channel attention block with batch normalization and Swish activation that strengthens channel reweighting and stabilizes optimization. The second module is a multi dilation extractor with three parallel convolutions that aggregate fine strokes and broad context followed by attention guided fusion and a one by one convolution. The pipeline is fully reproducible on CCPD2019 with automatic split generation, file name driven label conversion, deterministic cropping, OCR style label files, and scripted training. The detector converges quickly and reaches mAP at IoU 0.50 of about 0.995, so recognition is the main lever for improvement. Under a shared protocol with identical detector and crops, the combined recognizer with multi dilation and channel attention attains the highest end to end accuracy on the challenge split with 54.37, surpassing the baseline with 53.98 and the single module variants with 51.47 for channel attention and 53.09 for multi dilation, while remaining near ceiling on the base split with 99.87. Training directly on the challenge domain yields 73.87 on challenge, highlighting domain shift rather than capacity as the principal bottleneck.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it