This paper proposes a vehicle license plate recognition system, which has relatively a simple structure and is highly tolerant of noise, by using the DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform) coefficients extracted from the character region of a license plate and the LVQ(Learning Vector Quantization) neural network. The image of a license plate is taken from a captured vehicle image based on RGB color information, and the character region is derived by the histogram of the license plate and the relative position of individual characters in the plate. The feature vector obtained by the DCT of extracted character region is utilized as an input to the LVQ neural classifier fur the recognition process. In the experiment, 109 vehicle images captured under various types of circumstances were tested with the proposed method, and the relatively high extraction rate of license plates and recognition rate were achieved.