The objective of automatic vehicle number plate recognition systems (AVNPRS) is to accurately extract and recognize the vehicle number plate from the complicated background. AVNPRS we developed can realize functions of real time image capturing, number plate segmentation, number plate pre processing and character recognition etc. The experiment results show that the total recognition success rate can achieve 90% with relatively short time cost, about 1.5 (with a total number of 311 experimental images which resolution is 768×574).