License plate location method based on texture and color

License plate location (LPL) from moving vehicle images is a key step in license plate recognition (LPR) system. A novel LPL algorithm is proposed in this paper to jointly consider color and texture distribution features of license plate area (LPA) in an image. The method is divided into two steps of detecting vehicles through background subtraction method and locating LPA by combining texture features and color features respectively. Experimental results show that this method can efficiently overcome the limitation of vehicles with complicated background, and can consequently achieve high detection rate in complex situations.