The paper presents a smart camera aimed at security and law enforcement applications for intelligent transportation systems. An extended background is presented first as a scholar literature review. The smart camera components and their capabilities for automatic detection and recognition of selected parameters of cars, as well as different aspects of the system efficiency, are described and discussed in detail in subsequent sections. Smart features of make and model recognition (MMR), license plate recognition (LPR) and color recognition (CR) are highlighted as the main benefits of the system. Their implementations, flowcharts and recognition rates are described, discussed and finally reported in detail. In addition to MMR, three different approaches, referred to as bag-of-features, scalable vocabulary tree and pyramid match, are also considered. The conclusion includes a discussion of the smart camera system efficiency as a whole, with an insight into potential future improvements.