The need for Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems in countries all over the world has been on the increase. In this article, we will talk about license plates and ANPR specifically for the country of Brazil. We here at Plate Recognizer have worked relentlessly to refine our ANPR algorithms to support Brazil license plates.
Does Each State in Brazil have a Different Plate Style?
Brazil as a country consists of 26 states and each state in Brazil does not have a particular license plate style. This is unlike the United States, where each of the 50 states has a different license plate style, and unlike Australia, where each province has a different plate style. Brazil does not have this.
What are Typical ANPR Use Cases for Brazil?
Brazil is a country in South America with a land mass of 8.511 million km² and a population of 209 million. As a comparison, the entire United Kingdom only has a population of roughly 67 million which means a lot fewer license plates to read with ANPR for the UK. According to the National Traffic Department in Brazil, there are about 90 million vehicles operating in the country. Roughly 2.7 million vehicles are sold each year.
We have been fortunate to work with some great partners in Brazil to support their ANPR projects. We find that the use of ANPR tends to be in the areas of safety, security and accountability for the citizens and municipalities of Brazil. As such, typical license plate recognition use cases include parking access gates, parking management, logistics, and highway monitoring.
What Are the Old and New License Plates in Brazil?
Over the years, from 1990 until 2018, Brazil has utilized a license plate system known as the Olav’s system or Normal Series. This is considered the old license plate system. The new license plate system found in Brazil now is the Mercosur license plate. Since there are obviously still vehicles purchased before 2018 on the roads today, both the Normal series and the Mercosur license plates are being used today in Brazil.
Brazil old Normal Series license plate style. Source: Plate Recognizer Clients.
Brazil new Mercosur license plate style. Source: Plate Recognizer Clients.
When Did Each State Adopt the New Plate System?
Brazil adopted the Mercosur license plate system which is a common license of the South American bloc on the September 11, 2018. Rio de Janeiro was the first Brazilian state to adopt it. You can read more about that here.
Each state in Brazil was given a different date for the implementation of the new license plate system (Mercosur) by the Federal District (DF). The dates are stated below:
- December 3, 2018: Rio de Janeiro
- December 10, 2018: Amazonas, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Pernambuco, and Rondônia.
- December 17, 2018: Bahia, Rio Grande do Norte and Rio Grande do Sul.
- December 24, 2018: Acre, Alagoas, Maranhão, Paraná and Piauí.
- December 31, 2018: Amapá, Ceará, Distrito Federal, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pará, Paraíba, Roraima, Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Sergipe and Tocantins.
What are Key Differences in Old and New Brazilian License Plates?
The Mercosur system have different colors for number and letters, according to the kind of use the vehicle is destined and states. You can also check this out for more information about the adoption system.
The new license plates have a white background, with four-letter and four numbers combined. The difference between categories is the color of the font: in black for standard private cars, red for commercial vehicles, official cars in blue, testing cars in green, diplomatic cars in gold, and collectors in silver.
The new Mercosur license plates do not look like traditional ones. Instead of being gray, with three letters, and four numbers, these plates are blue and white, with three letters and three numbers. The plate also features a single code with data including the manufacturer’s name and the manufacturing date.
For the old Normal series, it consists of three letters, followed by a point and four numerals. And the categories are black on gray for passenger series and white on red for vehicles for hire (buses, trucks and trailers).
For more information regarding the old series, you can check here.
Plate Recognizer Supports Both License Plate Types of Brazil
From the start, we created a machine learning ANPR software engine to decode license plates. Our engine was originally trained with old Brazilian license plates with a very high level of accuracy.
Afterwards, with the help of several partners in Brazil, we retrained our ANPR engine to support both new plates (Mercosur plates) while retaining the model for old license plates. The tricky part is that we cannot discard all the old plates because those vehicles are still around in Brazil. So we had our neural network do extra work when customers indicate that their region is Brazil.
After a few months of work, we are now proud to say that we successfully support both old and new Brazil license plates. The Plate Recognizer ANPR software can fully and correctly decode the license plates in Brazil with over 98% accuracy. We even have mobile-friendly ALPR.
How this Benefits You!
Are you working on an ANPR project for Brazil? If so, we’d love to partner with you and power the license plate recognition for your application or hardware solution. Let us know!