In recent years, with the vigorous development of the national economy,there are more and more construct in the domestic expressway, urban road, and parking area. The requisition on the traffic control, safety management improves day by day. Therefore, license plate recognition technology has the particularly important practical application value in the public security and the traffic control. In the paper, a preliminary research was made on the license location, characters segment and characters recognition of the license plate recognition. On the license location,the projection was used to locate the license plate; On the characters segmentation, the liminal rule was used to divide the characters; In order to solve the problem of the digital characters recognition in the plate, BP nerve network was used to recognize the digital characters. After studying and mastering some basic principles of the digital image processing and pattern recognition, the task of license plate recognition was programmed with VC++ 6.0 using above principles. The license location and the digital characters recognition in the license plate were implemented.