Abstract: To locate license number of every freight car,a novel localization method is presented and implemented based on the visual attention mechanism.The method utilizes eye-tracking technology to collects real eye movement data,combines eye-tracking data with salient features extracted from car images to establish a visual attention model of car license.Then,the model is used to predict salient license areas and.Finally,image processing technology is applied to analyze and locate the license area.As experimental results show,this algorithm is more insensitive to different types of car and illumination variance,and performs better in robustness and universality than traditional methods based on intensity.