Patent ID: 8774465

Claim:
A method for use in a network comprising: with at least one computing device: receiving data comprising an electronic image of at least a portion of a vehicle from a prospective purchaser, automatically analyzing the image to identify a license plate area of the image; based on the identified license late area, automatically identifying a region of interest of the image corresponding to a rear portion of the vehicle around the license plate; automatically analyzing the region of interest of the image corresponding the rear portion of the vehicle around the license plate using at least one object recognition technique to extract features from the image; comparing the features extracted from the image with data associated with an image database of reference vehicle images for a plurality of reference vehicles, including features extracted from a region of interest of each reference vehicle image corresponding to a rear portion of the respective reference vehicle around the license plate; identifying a make and model of the vehicle based on the results of the comparison; and delivering vehicle-related information to the prospective purchaser based on the identified make and model of the vehicle.