Patent ID: 8218822

Claim:
An apparatus for extracting information from a vehicle license plate, comprising: one or more imaging devices for acquiring one or more images that include the vehicle license plate, where the one or more images include color information; a license plate detection module for detecting a vehicle license plate image portion within the one or more images; a license plate characteristic database for storing license plate characteristics of license plates issued by a plurality of state governments; an origin determination module for determining a plurality of license plate characteristics found in the vehicle license plate image portion, for comparing the license plate characteristics found in the vehicle license plate image portion to license plate characteristics stored in the license plate characteristic database, for determining based on the comparison multiple candidate state governments from which the vehicle license plate may have issued, for each of the multiple candidate state governments, applying a color test that is specific to the candidate state government, wherein each color test detects whether a particular color is present in a particular location in the vehicle license plate image portion, for selecting, based at least in part on the particular color detected in the particular location in the vehicle license plate image portion, at least one of the candidate state governments as the state government that issued the license plate, and for generating state issue information based on the selection; an optical character recognition engine for determining alphanumeric characters from the license plate image portion; and an output device for outputting the alphanumeric characters and the state issue information.