Face recognition (FR) and license plate recognition (LPR) are very crucial algorithms for identification of humans and vehicles in several applications such as surveillance, traffic and access-control. The advances in small single-board computers with high parallel processing power capabilities and the use of low-power Neural Processing Units (NPU) inside embedded System on Chips (SoC), enable real-time face detection (FD) and LPR at the edge. On the other hand, it is still a challenge to run multiple algorithms concurrently with high accuracy and prompt execution (high frame rates) that requires a very efficient software/video analytics algorithm development. Both FR and LPR algorithms need two-stage processing that involve detection and recognition. In this study, we propose a method that enables simultaneous face detection associated with landmark and quality information and LPR at the edge. The FD pipeline detects and tracks the faces, extracts landmarks and quality of faces, to select appropriate faces for recognition and then sends them to face recognition server. LPR algorithm consecutively performs detection and recognition on the embedded platform. Extended YOLO model is utilized for face selection while pruned YOLO and LPRNet models are exploited for license plate detection and license plate reading, respectively. In order to enable real-time performance with high accuracy; optimized AI-models and software architecture are used. As a result of this study, we obtain a high-performance, high-precision and real-time combined face/LPR recognition system which can be very useful for surveillance and security applications.
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