Aiming at the problem of low generalization of the license plate detection model， which makes it difficult to reuse in different application scenes of smart transportation， a license plate detection algorithm in unrestricted scenes based on adaptive confidence threshold was proposed. Firstly， a multi-prediction head network model was constructed， in it， the segmentation prediction head was used to reduce the model reuse pre-processing work， the adaptive confidence threshold prediction head was used to improve the model detection ability， and the multi-scale fusion mechanism and bounding box regression prediction head were used to improve the model generalization ability. Secondly， a differentiable binary network training method was adopted to learn model parameters through differentiable binary transformation combined with the training of classification confidence and confidence threshold. Finally， the Connectivity Aware Non-Maximum Suppression （CANMS） method was used to improve the post-processing speed of license plate detection， and the lightweight network ResNet18 was introduced as the backbone network of feature extraction to reduce the model parameters and further improve the detection speed. Experimental results show that in 6 scenes with different constraints in Chinese City Parking Dataset （CCPD）， the proposed algorithm can achieve the average precision of 99.5% and the recall of 99.8%， and achieves the efficient detection rate of 70 frames per second， which are better than the performance of anchor-based algorithms such as Faster Region-Conventional Neural Network （Faster R-CNN） and Single Shot MultiBox Detector （SSD）. On the three supplementary scene test sets， the license plate detection accuracy of the proposed algorithm is higher than 90% in unrestricted scenes with different resolutions， different shooting distances， and different shooting angles of pitch. Therefore， the proposed algorithm has good detection performance and generalization ability in unrestricted scenes， and can meet the requirements of model reuse.