Vehicle license plate recognition technology is an indispensable component of intelligent transport system and necessary means to ensure vehicle safety. A simple and practical license plate recognition system for intelligent residential area is designed in this paper, which include image acquisition and preprocessing, license plate location, edge detection, character recognition and so on. The system is developed and build on Qt software plate, and the grayscale and binarization，edge detection of the collected image are processed. In the meantime, the region is located by horizontal projection to eliminate the border, and then the license plate character is segmented by disposal projection. Finally, the characters are recognized and output according to the characteristic value. Experimental results show that the system is easy to detect and effective.