This paper presents a wavelet transform based method for extracting license plates from cluttered images. The proposed system consists of three major stages. First, wavelet transform based method is used for extracting important contrast features as guides to search for desired license plates. Then, finding a reference line in HL subimage plays an important role to locate the desired license plate region roughly. According to the reference line we can decrease the searching region of license plate and speed up the execution time. The last stage of the method to locate the license plate accurately by license plate adjustment. More importantly, the proposed detection method can locate multiple plates with different orientations in one image. Since the feature extracted robust to complex backgrounds, the proposed method works well in extracting differently illuminated and oriented license plates. The average accuracy of detection is 92.4%.