License Plate Recognition with Frigate and Home Assistant

Detecting people, cats, dogs, and cars with a Raspberry Pi and a camera is already a great first step into local AI. But things get a lot more useful when you move beyond object detection and start recognizing individual vehicles by their license plates.

In this article, I’ll show you how to add license plate recognition to Frigate using MQTT and integrate it with Home Assistant. We’ll track the last detected plate, distinguish between known and unknown vehicles, and, as a bonus, embed a complete custom license plate dashboard directly into Home Assistant.

To follow along, you’ll need a working Frigate + MQTT setup connected to Home Assistant. If you don’t have that yet, my previous series walks you through it:

• Part 1: Build a Security Camera System with Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi
• Part 2: Home Assistant Camera Setup: Frigate and MQTT with Local AI Detection
• (Optional) Part 3: Exploring Custom AI Models in Frigate

In a follow-up article, I’ll try to improve night vision and see if I can reduce overexposed license plates.