The invention relates to a method for carrying out fast vehicle comparison and vehicle type recognition at a tollgate. The method comprises the steps that firstly, a standard snapshot vehicle image is collected through a high-definition tollgate vidicon, the foreground vehicle detection is carried out on the image, and a vehicle area is extracted; the vehicle area is preprocessed, feature points are detected, a sift feature descriptor is calculated, a query tree carries out the inquiry, the rough vehicle type matching is achieved, a vehicle type data image set is obtained, accurate matching is carried out on standby vehicle type images through the sift feature descriptor again, geometric verification is carried out through geometric information, and a final vehicle type comparison result is obtained through rearrangement and is output. According to the method, the multi-scale sift feature serves as the descriptor of the image, the sift feature is the local feature of the image, invariance of image rotating, dimension zooming and luminance changing is kept, and certain stability of vision angle changing, radiation converting and noise is kept.