Canada
Canada issues plates provincially: ten provinces and three territories, each with its own colours, slogans and letter–digit patterns. Ontario runs a different format than British Columbia, Québec plates carry the French motto “Je me souviens”, and in most border cities your cameras will see a steady mix of Canadian and American plates in the same lane.
Generic OCR trips over provincial slogans, graphic backgrounds, and the visual overlap between Canadian and US designs. Our API reads the plate as printed, identifies the issuing province or territory, distinguishes Canadian plates from US plates in mixed traffic, and reports a confidence score on every read — 97%+ accuracy at under 200ms.
Live demo
Upload a vehicle photo and watch the API return the plate text, confidence score and vehicle details in real time. Your first 150 calls each month are free — no credit card required.
Upload image
Try it with Canadian plates
Drag and drop a vehicle photo here, or browse files
JPEG, PNG, or WebP — max 10MB, min 640×480
API response
// Upload an image to see the live response.
Coverage
Each province manages its own series: Ontario and Québec run seven-character formats, the Prairie and Atlantic provinces use shorter ones, and the territories add their own designs — including the Northwest Territories’ polar-bear-shaped plate. Personalized plates layer arbitrary combinations on top of all of it.
The models were trained on the full spread of Canadian designs, current and legacy, plus the US plates that share Canadian roads every day. If a read is ambiguous — a worn plate, a snow-covered corner, an angled dealer frame — the API says so with a low confidence score instead of returning a guess.
01
Standard passenger series across all 10 provinces and 3 territories.
02
Truck, commercial and farm series in each province’s format.
03
Compact motorcycle plates with condensed spacing.
04
Dealer and transporter plates.
05
Federal, provincial and municipal fleet plates.
06
Vanity combinations in each province’s allowed lengths.
07
American plates crossing the border are read and labelled as US.
API response
Responses include the plate text exactly as printed, the issuing province or territory, country classification for mixed Canada–US traffic, and optional vehicle details from the same image.
POST /v1/detect
{
"success": true,
"data": {
"plates": [
{
"text": "CJKB 123",
"confidence": 0.97,
"country": "CA",
"province": "ON",
"bounding_box": {
"x": 386, "y": 402,
"width": 158, "height": 78
}
}
],
"car": {
"brand": "Honda",
"model": "CR-V",
"body_type": "suv",
"color": {
"name": "gray",
"hex": "#9A9A9A"
}
}
},
"processing_time_ms": 156
}Use cases
The same self-serve motion as our US customers: card-swipe pricing, an API key in minutes, and no sales calls.
Automatic gate entry for residents and registered visitors — from Vancouver strata buildings to Toronto condo towers.
Permit checks and pay-by-plate verification for surface lots and garages in any province.
Recognize returning members on arrival and start the visit before the driver rolls down a window.
Yard check-in and gate automation for carriers whose lanes see Ontario, Québec and US plates in the same hour.
Re-verify camera reads with photo evidence and confidence scores before tickets or invoices go out.
Get an API key, send a photo, and receive the plate, province and confidence back in under 200ms — 150 free calls every month.
Also available
No per-country contracts or add-ons — the same endpoint reads plates from every supported market.
Every plate read can include brand, model, body type and color of the vehicle from the same image — explore the Car Recognition API