Vehicle information recognition is crucial in various practical domains, particularly in criminal investigations. Vehicle Color Recognition (VCR) has garnered significant research interest because color is a visually distinguishable attribute of vehicles and is less affected by partial occlusion and changes in viewpoint. Despite the success of existing methods for this task, the relatively low complexity of the datasets used in the literature has been largely overlooked. This research addresses this gap by compiling a new dataset representing a more challenging VCR scenario. The images - sourced from six license plate recognition datasets - are categorized into eleven colors, and their annotations were validated using official vehicle registration information. We evaluate the performance of four deep learning models on a widely adopted dataset and our proposed dataset to establish a benchmark. The results demonstrate that our dataset poses greater difficulty for the tested models and highlights scenarios that require further exploration in VCR. Remarkably, nighttime scenes account for a significant portion of the errors made by the best-performing model. This research provides a foundation for future studies on VCR, while also offering valuable insights for the field of fine-grained vehicle classification.
Vehicle color recognition plays an important role in intelligent traffic management and criminal investigation assistance. However, the current vehicle color recognition research involves at most 13 types of colors and the recognition accuracy is low, which is difficult to meet practical applications. To this end, this paper has built a benchmark dataset (Vehicle Color-24) that includes 24 types of vehicle colors, including 10091 vehicle pictures taken from 100 hours of urban road surveillance videos. In addition, in order to solve the problem of long tail distribution in Vehicle Color-24 dataset and low recognition rate of existing methods, this paper proposes a Smooth Modulated Neural Network with Multi-layer Feature Representation (SMNN-MFR) is used for 24 types of vehicle color recognition. SMNN-MFR includes four parts: feature extraction, multi-scale feature fusion, suggestion frame generation and smooth modulation. The model is trained and verified on the Vehicle Color-24 benchmark dataset. Comprehensive experiments show that the average recognition accuracy of the algorithm in the 24 categories of color benchmark databases is 94.96%, which is 33.47% higher than the Faster RCNN network. In addition, the average accuracy rate of the model when recognizing 8 types of colors is 97.25%, and the detection accuracy of algorithms in similar databases is improved. At the same time, visualization and ablation experiments also proved the rationality of our network settings and the effectiveness of each module. The code and database are published at: https://github.com/mendy-2013.
Vehicle color information is one of the important elements in ITS (Intelligent Traffic System). In this paper, we present a vehicle color recognition method using convolutional neural network (CNN). Naturally, CNN is designed to learn classification method based on shape information, but we proved that CNN can also learn classification based on color distribution. In our method, we convert the input image to two different color spaces, HSV and CIE Lab, and run it to some CNN architecture. The training process follow procedure introduce by Krizhevsky, that learning rate is decreasing by factor of 10 after some iterations. To test our method, we use publicly vehicle color recognition dataset provided by Chen. The results, our model outperform the original system provide by Chen with 2% higher overall accuracy.