The license plate recognition system, the license plate location is one of the important technologies, can accurately complete the orientation will directly affect the follow-up of the character segmentation and recognition. This paper presents a new color on discrimination based on characteristics of the vehicle license plate location, Firstly, edge detection, image enhancement preprocessing, effectively highlighting the license plate features, And then by line scanning of the plate rough location, and color-based features to distinguish the license plate location method further extract the real license plate. Experiments show that with the car in a complex background, this method can accurately locate the license plate.