A rapid vehicle license plate locating method is provided, which uses top hat transformation and character texture characteristic, and is divided into background subtraction, vehicle license plate region crude location and precision location three steps, specifically comprises: (1) background subtraction, converting obtained color vehicle license plate image into gray image, using top hat transformation to inhibit large-size background object, highlighting vehicle license plate region; (2) crude location phase, calculating image edge map and proceeding binaryzation, morphological dilation and connected components analysis and other operation, obtaining reasonable size vehicle license plate candidate region set; (3) precision location phase, extracting candidate region texture characteristic, using support vector machine classifier to classify candidate vehicle license plate region, thus accurately locating vehicle license plate region. The invention uses the top hat transformation to filter vehicle license plate image, reduces large-size background interference, so that greatly enhances environment adaptation; meanwhile, from crude to fine location method is more efficient, and reduces greatly computing complexity.