This is great work for someone who&#x27;s been <i>dabbling with deep learning</i>.  I used to work on OCR systems for postal address recognition and for the most part this is how I would have approached the problem.<p>A couple of suggestions:<p>You will almost certainly get better accuracy with a broader array of input fonts.  I&#x27;m not sure how well you can simulate all of the image conditions that might occur in a real system so adding some real images to the training set (if you can find them - but I suspect there are OCR type training sets available these days) would probably help.<p>For the speed problem I like the idea of using a simpler net, probably with a course scale image for pre-detection.  You can set an appropriate detection threshold to avoid false negatives and thereby avoid running the full net on the vast majority of images which won&#x27;t contain anything that looks like a plate number.