This paper describes a new method for locating and recognizing colored patterns of characters in complex scene images where translation, rotation, scale and contrast are unknown. A model of local shape feature vectors is presented. It consists of three vectors and represents some identifiable features in a pattern of characters. Based on this model, potential search points are first found from an unknown target image with this model matched to its edge image. Then template matching technique is employed on these candidate points, which results are classified by a simple nearest neighborhood method and a best match is finally picked out in each cluster. Thus, multiple instances of a pattern of characters are matched and recognized. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.