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In recent years, Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR) has attracted a lot of attention as it plays a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Accurate and efficient VMMR systems are required in real-world applications including intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving. The paper introduces a new large-scale dataset and a novel deep learning paradigm for VMMR. A new large-scale dataset dubbed Diverse large-scale VMM (DVMM) is proposed collecting image-samples with the most popular vehicle brands operating in Europe. A novel VMMR framework is proposed which follows a two-branch architecture performing make and model recognition respectively. A two-stage training procedure and a novel decision module are proposed to process the make and model predictions and compute the final model prediction. In addition, a novel metric based on the true positive rate is proposed to compare classification confusion of the proposed 2B–2S and the baseline methods. A complex experimental validation is carried out, demonstrating the generality, diversity, and practicality of the proposed DVMM dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed framework provides 93.95 % accuracy over the more diverse DVMM dataset and 95.85 % accuracy over traditional VMMR datasets. The proposed two-branch approach outperforms the conventional one-branch approach for VMMR over small-, medium-, and large-scale datasets by providing lower vehicle model confusion and reduced inter-make ambiguity. The paper demonstrates the advantages of the proposed two-branch VMMR paradigm in terms of robustness and lower confusion relative to single-branch designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]