Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) plays a major role in real life applications and several techniques have been proposed. The localization or detection of the number plate of the vehicle images is the basis for any ANPR system. This paper proposes a robust method for localization of number plates in different conditions. There are two stages; first the preprocessing of the input image is performed and then localization is done. After preprocessing the statistical measures such as root mean square error and peak signal to noise ratio are calculated. Next the localization is done using symmetric wavelets and mathematical morphology. Experimental results show that this method gives dominant values of RMSE and PSNR. Experiments were performed on a database and also on a sample of 280 images of different countries taken from various scenes and conditions; results show that success rate of 77.14% on database and 92.14% on sample images achieved.