The invention discloses a vehicle type recognition method based on a rapid R-CNN deep neural network, which mainly comprises unsupervised deep learning, a multilayer CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), a regional advice network, network sharing and a softmax classifier. The vehicle type recognition method realizes a framework for implementing end-to-end vehicle detection and recognition by using one rapid R-CNN network in a real sense, and is capable of carrying out quick vehicle sub-category recognition with high accuracy and robustness under the environment of being applicable to the shape diversity, the illumination variation diversity, the background diversity and the like of vehicle targets.