SIRAM OCR, our deep learning-based license plate recognition engine, today recognizes license plates from more than 100 countries acroRather than just listing countries, it’s worth looking at SIRAM OCR’s actual coverage by continent:

Continent	Countries recognized
Europe	49
Americas	22
Asia	18
Africa	15
Oceania	3
Total	+107

Europe

Europe has the widest coverage, including virtually all EU member states plus several countries outside the bloc: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, the whole Eastern European bloc (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, among others), and microstates such as Andorra, Monaco or Gibraltar. The differences among European countries alone justify a robust engine: single- or two-row formats, EU color bands, or non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic in Belarus and Ukraine, or Greek in Greece.

Americas

With 22 supported countries, coverage across the Americas ranges from the United States (with state-level variations) to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. The Americas add an extra challenge: in many countries, each state or province issues its own series, with different typography and markings within a single country.

Asia

Asia accounts for 18 countries in SIRAM’s coverage, including the United Arab Emirates (with distinct formats per emirate, such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah or Ajman), Georgia and Azerbaijan. It’s in Asia and the Middle East where international recognition becomes especially demanding, due to Arabic and Latin alphabets coexisting on the same plate.

Africa

With 15 countries, including Morocco as one of the most established markets, Africa combines European-influenced formats with Arabic characters across North Africa.

Oceania

Oceania’s 3 countries are the most recent addition to the engine, reflecting OCR’s ongoing process of expanding coverage.Plutôt que de nous limiter à une simple liste, voici la répartition réelle de la couverture de SIRAM OCR par continent :

AMERICA: 22 | EUROPE: 49 | AFRICA: 18 | ASIA: 13 | OCEANIA: 3 

Recognizing international alphabets

This is one of the aspects almost no manufacturer explains in detail, yet it’s decisive for any international recognition project. The OCR engine doesn’t just have to read Latin numbers and letters: where the country is supported, it can also work with:

• Latin alphabet, the most widespread, covering most European and American plates.
• Cyrillic characters, found for example on plates from Belarus and Ukraine.
• Greek alphabet, used on Greek license plates.
• Arabic characters, common across the Middle East and North Africa, where countries such as the United Arab Emirates frequently combine Arabic characters and Latin numbers on the same plate.
• Other national symbols and markings, such as stamps, crests or color bands that identify the vehicle type or region of registration.

Advanced ANPR systems typically allow configuring whether the engine should interpret Latin characters, non-Latin characters, or both at once, precisely to handle cases where a single plate combines two alphabets, as happens in several Middle Eastern countries. The more alphabets and variants an engine recognizes, the lower the risk of false negatives in real international traffic environments.

Applications of international license plate recognition

The ability to recognize license plates from multiple countries and alphabets isn’t just a technical exercise: it has direct application in environments where vehicles of different nationalities coexist:

• Parking: airports, stations and parking facilities in tourist or border areas, where the share of foreign vehicles can be very high.
• Smart City: management of low-emission zones, traffic control and urban mobility.
• Tolling: international corridors where vehicles registered in different countries coexist.
• Border control: identifying vehicles at border crossings and customs checkpoints.
• Ports: managing vehicles and fleets at port terminals with international freight traffic.
• Logistics: tracking fleets and commercial vehicles that cross borders.
• Industry: access control at industrial estates and facilities with international suppliers and visitors.
• Retail: identifying customers for click & collect or plate-based loyalty programs.
• Drive-through: fast vehicle recognition in service lanes with no need to stop.
• Free flow: reading moving vehicles’ plates with no barriers, on highways and high-speed corridors.

---

Frequently asked questions

SIRAM OCR today recognizes more than 100 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, supporting the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic alphabets depending on the country. This coverage isn’t static: thanks to the engine’s continuous learning — explained in the first article of this series — it keeps growing every time a new national format needs to be trained.

Key facts

Aspect	Detail
Countries supported	+107 (Europe 49, Americas 22, Asia 18, Africa 15, Oceania 3)
Alphabets supported	Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic (depending on country)
Accuracy	Up to 99% under favorable conditions
Core technology	Deep learning / convolutional neural networks
Learning new countries	Through training the engine on new data

Our ALPR solution (SIRAM OCR) allows a fast learning process when adding new unrecognized countries. This means that the license plate recognition engine software responsible of the license plates identification can in a record time learn and support new license plates types from new unrecognized countries. Currently, thanks to deep learning, our SIRAM OCR ALPR solution allows recognizing more than 100 countries with a high success rate.

Nowadays, thanks to Deep learning, our ALPR OCR technological solution allows to recognize vehicles license plates from more than 100 countries with a high accuracy rate, which in many of them is higher than 99%.

Find out more about SIRAM OCR here or contact Innova System Group.