The aim of this paper is on presenting a new and simple, but fast and efficient technique for automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) using SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) features. The proposed system is used to automatically locate and recognize, as a special case, the Jordanian license plates. In the core of our system, SIFT-based template matching technique is used to locate special marks in the license plate.
Upon successful detection of those marks, the license plate is segmented out from the original image and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is used to recognize the characters or numbers from the plate. Due to the various invariance virtues of SIFT, our method can adaptively deal with various changes in the license plates, such as rotation, scaling, and illumination. Experimental results using real datasets are presented, which show that our system has a good performance.