In this research, 150 samples are collected specifically for standard and non-standard Malaysian plates containing single row and double rows plates and based on specific effecting factors. Based on experimental results, the accuracy of license plate localization process is 97.4%, while the accuracy of the segmentation process and character recognition process are 96% and 76% respectively. The overall success rate of the proposed system reached 71% outperforming many of the existing techniques. Results also show that several environmental factors have significant impacts on the performance of plate recognition system.