A detection-based segmentation-free method and system for license plate recognition. An image of a vehicle is initially captured utilizing an image-capturing unit. A license plate region is located in the image of the vehicle. A set of characters can then be detected in the license plate region and a geometry correction performed based on a location of the set of characters detected in the license plate region. An operation for sweeping an OCR across the license plate region can be performed to infer characters with respect to the set of characters and locations of the characters utilizing a hidden Markov model and leveraging anchored digit/character locations.