A Multi-Angle Appearance-Based Approach for Vehicle Type and Brand Recognition Utilizing Faster Regional Convolution Neural Networks

Vehicle type and brand information constitute a crucial element in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). While numerous appearance-based classification methods have studied frontal view images of vehicles, the challenge of multi-pose and multi-angle vehicle distribution has largely been overlooked. This paper proposes an appearance-based classification approach for multi-angle vehicle information recognition, addressing the aforementioned issues. By utilizing faster regional convolution neural networks, this method automatically captures crucial features for vehicle type and brand identification, departing from traditional handcrafted feature extraction techniques. To extract rich and discriminative vehicle information, ZFNet and VGG16 are employed. Vehicle feature maps are then imported into the region proposal network and classification location refinement network, with the former generating candidate regions potentially containing vehicle targets on the feature map. Subsequently, the latter network refines vehicle locations and classifies vehicle types. Additionally, a comprehensive vehicle dataset, Car5_48, is constructed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, encompassing multi-angle images across five vehicle types and 48 vehicle brands. The experimental results on this public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in accurately classifying vehicle types and brands.