Vision-based Automated Vehicle Recognition (VAVR) has attracted considerable attention recently. Particularly given the reliance on emerging deep learning methods, which have powerful feature extraction and pattern learning abilities, vehicle recognition has made significant progress. VAVR is an essential part of Intelligent Transportation Systems. The VAVR system can fast and accurately locate a target vehicle, which significantly helps improve regional security. A comprehensive VAVR system contains three components: Vehicle Detection (VD), Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR), and Vehicle Re-identification (VRe-ID). These components perform coarse-to-fine recognition tasks in three steps. In this article, we conduct a thorough review and comparison of the state-of-the-art deep learning--based models proposed for VAVR. We present a detailed introduction to different vehicle recognition datasets used for a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed models. We also critically discuss the major challenges and future research trends involved in each task. Finally, we summarize the characteristics of the methods for each task. Our comprehensive model analysis will help researchers that are interested in VD, VMMR, and VRe-ID and provide them with possible directions to solve current challenges and further improve the performance and robustness of models.
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