Automatic number plate recognition for motorcyclists riding without helmet

Abstract

Motorcycles have always been the primary mode of transport in developing countries. In recent years, there has been a rise in motorcycle accidents. One of the major reasons for fatalities in accidents is the motorcyclist not wearing a protective helmet. The most prevalent method for ensuring that motorcyclists wear helmet is traffic police manually monitoring motorcyclists at road junctions or through CCTV footage and penalizing those without helmet. But, it requires human intervention and efforts. This paper proposes an automated system for detecting motorcyclists not wearing helmet and retrieving their motorcycle number plates from CCTV footage video. The proposed system first does background subtraction from video to get moving objects. Then, moving objects are classified as motorcyclist or non-motorcyclist. For classified motorcyclist, head portion is located and it is classified as helmet or non-helmet. Finally, for identified motorcyclist without helmet, number plate of motorcycle is detected and the characters on it are extracted. The proposed system uses Convolutional Neural Networks trained using transfer learning on top of pre-trained model for classification which has helped in achieving greater accuracy. Experimental results on traffic videos show an accuracy of 98.72% on detection of motorcyclists without helmet.