A Practical Unified Network for Localization and Recognition of Arbitrary-Oriented Container Code and Type.

The fast and accurate recognition of the container code and type is very important to speed up the passage of trucks through the gate and improve the efficiency of port. In this paper, a Practical Unified Network (PUN) is proposed for the first time to recognize arbitrary-oriented container code and type. The model is based on the encoder-decoder network, which integrates the detection of the second part of container code, the semantic segmentation of the three parts of container code and type, and the classification of single character features of container code and type. The ablation experiments verified the performance of each part of PUN, and obtained a stable and reliable model. The comparison experiments compare PUN with state-of-the-art text detection and end-to-end text recognition algorithms, and the results show that PUN achieves almost the best performance in both container code and type detection and end-to-end recognition. The proposed algorithm has only 15.53M parameters, with a FPS of 4.86 with a input size of 768×768, which meets the company’s needs. Our model has been deployed and running in multi smart gates of Shanghai Port for nearly a year, showed certain practical application capabilities.