Send any photo — a dashcam frame, a driveway shot, a lot walk. We find the plate, read it, correct it against the issuing state's format, and hand back the serial with ranked states and per-character confidences. Images are never stored.
Drop in a photo — a dashcam frame, a driveway shot, a lot walk — and see exactly what the API returns: the plate, the issuing state, per-character confidence and the bounding box drawn on your image. No account, no key. Your photo is read in memory and never stored.
Measured on the industry-standard OpenALPR US benchmark — 222 real-world images, no location hints.
We detect the plate anywhere in the scene — multi-vehicle shots included — so you can send frames exactly as your camera captures them.
Characters are corrected against the issuing state's plate format, with up to five ranked candidate states — each carrying its own corrected serial.
Photos are processed in memory and discarded the moment the read completes. Only the structured result ever leaves the pipeline.
Every response is built for automation: enough signal to trust a clean read, and enough detail to build your own capture, review or retry flow around an uncertain one.
The plate separator-free and corrected against the state's format — the exact string to feed into a lookup — plus a display variant with separators.
The most likely jurisdiction with its confidence, covering all 50 states, DC and US territories.
Up to five alternative states, each with its own corrected serial — perfect for retrying a missed lookup, highest confidence first.
A score for every character alongside the whole-string confidence, so you can pinpoint exactly which glyph is uncertain.
Pixel coordinates of the plate in your image with a detection confidence — draw overlays or crop for human review.
A single trusted boolean, backed by explicit warnings that explain why a read wasn't trusted — blur, glare, low state confidence.
Passenger, commercial, motorcycle and more, plus a flag when the plate looks personalized. Vanity plates still resolve to VINs.
Additional plates detected in the same photo, ordered by detection confidence, in the same shape as the primary read.
Pass ordered guesses for the issuing state — e.g. where your camera lives — as a prior that strongly improves accuracy without overriding evidence.
A single authenticated POST
takes your image as a base64 JSON body or a multipart upload, and returns one clean,
predictable JSON document — whatever the photo looks like.
{
"success": true,
"status": "ok",
"request_id": "9e177840deec",
"image": { "width": 3913, "height": 2678 },
"plate": {
"plate": "ZZC31V",
"plate_display": "ZZC-31V",
"confidence": 0.985,
"char_confidences": [0.999, 0.999, 0.996, 0.996, 0.999, 0.995],
"bbox": [2690, 1753, 3076, 2059],
"detection_confidence": 0.91,
"state": {
"code": "NJ",
"name": "New Jersey",
"confidence": 0.98
},
"state_candidates": [
{ "code": "NJ", "name": "New Jersey", "confidence": 0.98, "plate": "ZZC31V" },
{ "code": "NY", "name": "New York", "confidence": 0.01, "plate": "ZZC31V" }
],
"plate_type": "passenger",
"is_vanity_likely": false,
"warnings": [],
"trusted": true
}
}
OCR is deliberately read-only: it never triggers a plate lookup on its own, so an uncertain
read can't silently spend one. When a read comes back trusted,
pass it to our License Plate to VIN API
to resolve the vehicle.
Send the photo. Get the plate, issuing state and confidences back.
Clean reads are marked trusted — uncertain ones tell you exactly why.
Send the plate and state, get the VIN — retry with candidate states if needed.
The corrected plate serial read from the photo, ranked candidate issuing states, per-character confidences and the plate's bounding box — from a single POST with the image as base64 JSON or multipart.
No. Images are processed in memory to produce the OCR result and are never stored.
No — OCR is read-only by design. You decide when a read is good enough to convert, then call /api/convert explicitly with the returned plate and state, so you're never charged for a lookup you didn't intend.
Against a benchmark of real-world photos with published scoring conventions — exact-match plate reads and state identification are reported separately. Read the full methodology for details.
Create an account, grab your API key, and turn your first photo into a plate and state in minutes.