BLPR: Robust License Plate Recognition under Viewpoint and Illumination Variations via Confidence-Driven VLM Fallback

Robust license plate recognition in unconstrained environments remains a significant challenge, particularly in underrepresented regions with limited data availability and unique visual characteristics, such as Bolivia. Recognition accuracy in real-world conditions is often degraded by factors such as illumination changes and viewpoint distortion. To address these challenges, we introduce BLPR, a novel deep learning-based License Plate Detection and Recognition (LPDR) framework specifically designed for Bolivian license plates. The proposed system follows a two-stage pipeline where a YOLO-based detector is pretrained on synthetic data generated in Blender to simulate extreme perspectives and lighting conditions, and subsequently fine-tuned on street-level data collected in La Paz, Bolivia. Detected plates are geometrically rectified and passed to a character recognition model. To improve robustness under ambiguous scenarios, a lightweight vision-language model (Gemma3 4B) is selectively triggered as a confidence-based fallback mechanism. The proposed framework further leverages synthetic-to-real domain adaptation to improve robustness under diverse real-world conditions. We also introduce the first publicly available Bolivian LPDR dataset, enabling evaluation under diverse viewpoint and illumination conditions. The system achieves a character-level recognition accuracy of 89.6% on real-world data, demonstrating its effectiveness for deployment in challenging urban environments. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/EdwinTSalcedo/BLPR.