This different types of license plates being used, the requirement of an automatic license plate recognition system is different for each country. In this paper, an automatic license plate detection system is proposed for Malaysian vehicles with standard license plates based on image processing and clustering. After applying image enhancement, the image is segmented using clustering and run length smoothing algorithm approach to identify the location of the license plate. A proposed algorithm called cluster run length smoothing algorithm approach was applied to locate the license plate at the right position. Enhanced geometrical feature topological analysis has been used as the feature extraction technique while support vector machine has been applied as the classification technique. Three separate experiments were performed and compared. From those experiments, analysis based on segmentation and classification errors were constructed. The results showed that the proposed prototype system gives up to 80% of accuracy rate.