This paper presents a new vision based approach to vehicle re-identification (VRI) for smart transportation systems by fusion of multiple features. Unlike the conventional VRI systems which adopted loop sensors to capture inductive features for classification, we developed a hierarchical method for VRI by coarse-to-fine image matching. More specifically, VRI is performed at fine level by image matching using distinctive and anonymous features which are extracted from the large number of interesting points detected from the vehicle and its license plate images at coarse level. To achieve robustness, the thresholding of matching criteria is based on the dynamic analysis of the time series of vehicle images rather than predefined. In addition, the fusion of multiple features is conducted via a weighted probability scheme. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed new approach, a series of field testing were conducted, where 301 vehicles were considered for data calibration and 1699 vehicles were used for validation tests. The accuracy of matching rate reaches 73.51%. 85.52% and greater than 90% respectively by using density features, fusion of selected distinctive features and fusion of multimodal features.