A Novel Approach to Detect Indian High Security Registration Plates Arnav Bhardwaj 1 and Sumita Gupta 2 1-2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Noida, India Email: arnavbhardwaj622@gmail.com, sumitagoyal@gmail.com Abstract—In recent times, with the growing number of vehicles, road safety has become a paramount issue. To ensure safe and easy passage of vehicles on the road, it is important that we take help of certain techniques that ensure the road safety regulations are properly followed. The Government of India has mandated the usage of High Security Registration Plate (HSRP) to ensure safety of vehicles, since these plates are tamper proof and cannot be counterfeited easily. In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach to detect the HSRP on a car. The most prominent feature detectable through images of an HSRP is the “IND” text inscribed on it. We have used three License Plate (LP) detection models: Warped Planar Object Detection Network (WPOD-Net), You Only Look Once (YOLO) version 3 (YOLOv3) and version 5 (YOLOv5) to detect the license plate on a car. Once a plate is detected, we apply EasyOCR to determine whether the plate has “IND” inscribed on it or not. A comparative analysis is done on these three models and our experimental results show that WPOD-Net with EasyOCR gives and accuracy of 93.01%, making the proposed approach viable for HSRP detection. Index Terms— ALPR, High Security Registration Plate, YOLO, WPOD-Net, EasyOCR, Object Detection, Optical Character Recognition. I. INTRODUCTION In today’s world, personal vehicles have become an important factor for people and therefore it becomes imperative to ensure that the vehicles follow rules as laid down by the government. These rules can be for car safety, pedestrian safety, occupant safety etc. In order to ensure that people follow rules, vigilance becomes a must, and the police personnel take it upon themselves to ensure that these rules are followed. With the increase in theft of vehicles, the Indian government has mandated the use of High Security Registration Plates (HSRP) in all vehicles. The HSRP plate comes with a lot of benefits like a hologram with ‘chakra’ and “IND” inscribed on it. This makes it stand out from the ordinary plate and this also makes identification of a number plate as HSRP or not very easy. These plates come with snap-locks that ensure that once a plate has been fixed on a car, it cannot come out without damaging the car as well as the number plate itself. Apart from this, the plate also has a 10-digit unique number identifier that can be used by the government to get all the details about the owner. All cars in India today must have an HSRP plate, or otherwise they have to pay a fine. License plates on a vehicle are used for uniquely identifying the vehicles. These are registered on the name of people and can be used to identify the owner of the car when required. In the past few years Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems have been used in a variety of places like traffic management, toll tax Grenze ID: 01.GIJET.8.2.519_1 © Grenze Scientific Society, 2022 Grenze International Journal of Engineering and Technology, June Issue