The invention discloses a video stream-based license plate recognition method, comprising the following steps: S1, detecting triggering, namely defining a rectangular region of interest, obtaining a binary image in the rectangular region of interest by a frame difference, and judging whether a vehicle passes through the region according to the result of the binary image; S2, license plate location, namely carrying out license plate detection in the detection region in the image, and cutting a detected license plate out to obtain a license plate image; S3, license plate pretreatment, namely carrying out license plate inclination correction and accurate license plate cutting on the license plate image; S4, license plate character cutting, namely cutting the character on the license plate image, and decomposing the character into a single character image; S5, license plate character recognition; S6, repeating operations from the steps S2 to S5 on each frame of image to obtain a plurality of license plate recognition results; and S7, result voting. By the video stream-based license plate recognition method, license plate recognition is carried out on the basis of a plurality of frames of images. Thus, the risk caused by a recognition error of a single image is greatly reduced, and the overall recognition rate of the license plate is improved.