In order to solve the low recognition rate of template matching method in license plate character recognition, especially the similar characters, this paper proposes a method of license plate recognition based on template matching combined with local HOG features.First, we use the template matching method for preliminary identification of all the characters of a license plate.Second, the HOG features corresponding to the most discriminative characters among the similar characters of the plate and the template are extracted, and then the feature vector is constructed.Last, according to the Euclidean distance among feature vectors to measure the similarity of the license plate character and the template character, and then complete the second recognition.The experimental results show that this method is effective to solve the problem of false recognition of similar character and the recognition rate is significantly improved.