Abstract. A vehicle's license plate is the unique feature by which to identify each individual vehicle. As an important research area of an intelligent transportation system, the recognition of vehicle license plates has been investigated for some decades. An approach based on a visual attention model and deep learning is proposed to handle the problem of Chinese car license plate recognition for traffic videos. We first use a modified visual attention model to locate the license plate, and then the license plate is segmented into seven blocks using a projection method. Two classifiers, which combine the advantages of convolutional neural network-based feature learning and support vector machine for multichannel processing, are designed to recognize Chinese characters, numbers, and alphabet letters, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the presented method can achieve high recognition accuracy and works robustly even under the conditions of illumination change and noise contamination. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.