Abstract: Vehicle license plate recognition system is applied in a wide range of areas such as the bridge, the junction of automatic toll collection, parking unattended, automatically records of the vehicle regulations. By studying on character segmentation in the license plate system, and on the basis of gradient sharpening and noise removal of discrete miscellaneous points, the paper proposes a simply divide method by progressive and column scan, and applies it to characters in rapid segmentation of license images, the accuracy is improved significantly.

Key words: license plate, character segmentation, gradient sharpening, scan