This paper proposes an efficient method, the hybrid localization scheme, to solve the problem of Macau license plate localization. The approach is based on the edge analysis and statistics. Considering the characteristics of Macau license plates, proper edge analysis thresholds are acquired by statistics. The characteristics of black background and various rang of the ratio are added to the hierarchical scheme to determine the final location area. The experiment shows that the accuracy is improved a lot comparing to the previous methods. © 2009 IEEE.