Highlights? An automatic container-code recognition system is developed by using computer vision. ? The characteristics of characters are made full use of to locate container-code. ? A two-step method is proposed to segment characters for various imaging conditions. Automatic container-code recognition is of great importance to the modern container management system. Similar techniques have been proposed for vehicle license plate recognition in past decades. Compared with license plate recognition, automatic container-code recognition faces more challenges due to the severity of nonuniform illumination and invalidation of color information. In this paper, a computer vision based container-code recognition technique is proposed. The system consists of three function modules, namely location, isolation, and character recognition. In location module, we propose a text-line region location algorithm, which takes into account the characteristics of single character as well as the spatial relationship between successive characters. This module locates the text-line regions by using a horizontal high-pass filter and scanline analysis. To resolve nonuniform illumination, a two-step procedure is applied to segment container-code characters, and a projection process is adopted to isolate characters in the isolation module. In character recognition module, the character recognition is achieved by classifying the extracted features, which represent the character image, with trained support vector machines (SVMs). The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique for practical usage.