  This work addresses the problem of vehicle identification through
non-overlapping cameras. As our main contribution, we introduce a novel dataset
for vehicle identification, called Vehicle-Rear, that contains more than three
hours of high-resolution videos, with accurate information about the make,
model, color and year of nearly 3,000 vehicles, in addition to the position and
identification of their license plates. To explore our dataset we design a
two-stream CNN that simultaneously uses two of the most distinctive and
persistent features available: the vehicle's appearance and its license plate.
This is an attempt to tackle a major problem: false alarms caused by vehicles
with similar designs or by very close license plate identifiers. In the first
network stream, shape similarities are identified by a Siamese CNN that uses a
pair of low-resolution vehicle patches recorded by two different cameras. In
the second stream, we use a CNN for OCR to extract textual information,
confidence scores, and string similarities from a pair of high-resolution
license plate patches. Then, features from both streams are merged by a
sequence of fully connected layers for decision. In our experiments, we
compared the two-stream network against several well-known CNN architectures
using single or multiple vehicle features. The architectures, trained models,
and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/icarofua/vehicle-rear.
