Abstract License Plate Recognition (LPR) is a fairly well explored problem and is already a component of several commer- cially operational systems. Many of these systems, however, require sophisticated video capture hardware possibly com- bined with infrared strobe lights or exploit the large size of license plates in certain geographical regions and the (ar- ti?cially) high discriminability of characters. In this paper, we describe an LPR system that achieves a high recogni- tion rate without the need for a high quality video signal from expensive hardware. We also explore the problem of car make and model recognition for purposes of searching surveillance video archives for a partial license plate num- ber combined with some visual description of a car. Our proposed methods will provide valuable situational infor- mation for law enforcement units in a variety of civil infras- tructures.