Abstract: According to the gray distribution of license plate, we propose a new method to locate license plate.In this method, we first locate vehicle license plate rough and get the upper and lower boundaries by using the gray distribution features of it.Then, we use the vertical projection to get the left and right boundaries of the license plate initially according to the characteristics of license plate texture and character closely.Finally, we amend left and right boundaries of the plate according to the character width and spacing.The experiment proved that the method has good adaptability in a complex background, anti-interference, real time, accurate location and so on.