Relaxed syntax modeling in Transformers for future-proof license plate recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Meyer, Florent, Guichard, Laurent, Coquenet, Denis, Gravier, Guillaume, Soullard, Yann, Coüasnon, Bertrand
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917014654681088
author Meyer, Florent
Guichard, Laurent
Coquenet, Denis
Gravier, Guillaume
Soullard, Yann
Coüasnon, Bertrand
author_facet Meyer, Florent
Guichard, Laurent
Coquenet, Denis
Gravier, Guillaume
Soullard, Yann
Coüasnon, Bertrand
contents Effective license plate recognition systems are required to be resilient to constant change, as new license plates are released into traffic daily. While Transformer-based networks excel in their recognition at first sight, we observe significant performance drop over time which proves them unsuitable for tense production environments. Indeed, such systems obtain state-of-the-art results on plates whose syntax is seen during training. Yet, we show they perform similarly to random guessing on future plates where legible characters are wrongly recognized due to a shift in their syntax. After highlighting the flows of positional and contextual information in Transformer encoder-decoders, we identify several causes for their over-reliance on past syntax. Following, we devise architectural cut-offs and replacements which we integrate into SaLT, an attempt at a Syntax-Less Transformer for syntax-agnostic modeling of license plate representations. Experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show that our approach reaches top accuracy on past syntax and most importantly nearly maintains performance on future license plates. We further demonstrate the robustness of our architecture enhancements by way of various ablations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relaxed syntax modeling in Transformers for future-proof license plate recognition
Meyer, Florent
Guichard, Laurent
Coquenet, Denis
Gravier, Guillaume
Soullard, Yann
Coüasnon, Bertrand
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Effective license plate recognition systems are required to be resilient to constant change, as new license plates are released into traffic daily. While Transformer-based networks excel in their recognition at first sight, we observe significant performance drop over time which proves them unsuitable for tense production environments. Indeed, such systems obtain state-of-the-art results on plates whose syntax is seen during training. Yet, we show they perform similarly to random guessing on future plates where legible characters are wrongly recognized due to a shift in their syntax. After highlighting the flows of positional and contextual information in Transformer encoder-decoders, we identify several causes for their over-reliance on past syntax. Following, we devise architectural cut-offs and replacements which we integrate into SaLT, an attempt at a Syntax-Less Transformer for syntax-agnostic modeling of license plate representations. Experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show that our approach reaches top accuracy on past syntax and most importantly nearly maintains performance on future license plates. We further demonstrate the robustness of our architecture enhancements by way of various ablations.
title Relaxed syntax modeling in Transformers for future-proof license plate recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17051