liceHow to detect vehicle license plates in photos in Java

License plate recognition has a plethora of useful applications, but is usually locked behind the steep challenge of setting up a photo processing AI and then training it. Today, we will be skipping this difficult and time-consuming process, and should have our license plate recognition ready to go in just a few minutes using just a little Java and an API.

First we need to add references to Maven POM so that we can dynamically compile our library using Jitpack.

Repository Reference:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Dependency Reference:

<dependencies>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.Cloudmersive</groupId>
    <artifactId>Cloudmersive.APIClient.Java</artifactId>
    <version>v2.75</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

Now we call recognizeDetectVehicleLicensePlates, and let our API go to work for us.

// Import classes:
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiClient;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiException;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.Configuration;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.auth.*;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.RecognizeApi;
ApiClient defaultClient = Configuration.getDefaultApiClient();
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
ApiKeyAuth Apikey = (ApiKeyAuth) defaultClient.getAuthentication("Apikey");
Apikey.setApiKey("YOUR API KEY");
// Uncomment the following line to set a prefix for the API key, e.g. "Token" (defaults to null)
//Apikey.setApiKeyPrefix("Token");
RecognizeApi apiInstance = new RecognizeApi();
File imageFile = new File("/path/to/file"); // File | Image file to perform the operation on.  Common file formats such as PNG, JPEG are supported.
try {
VehicleLicensePlateDetectionResult result = apiInstance.recognizeDetectVehicleLicensePlates(imageFile);
System.out.println(result);
} catch (ApiException e) {
System.err.println("Exception when calling RecognizeApi#recognizeDetectVehicleLicensePlates");
e.printStackTrace();
}

And it’s really just as simple as that. Our response will be given in this format:

{
  "Successful": true,
  "DetectedLicensePlates": [
    {
      "LicensePlateText_BestMatch": "string",
      "LicensePlateText_RunnerUp": "string",
      "LocationX": 0,
      "LocationY": 0,
      "Width": 0,
      "Height": 0,
      "LicensePlateRecognitionConfidenceLevel": 0
    }
  ],
  "DetectedLicensePlateCount": 0
}