A vision-based method for positioning and orienting of pallets is presented in this paper, which guides autonomous forklifts to engage pallets automatically. The method uses a single camera mounted on the fork carriage instead of two cameras for stereo vision that is conventionally used for positioning objects in 3D space. An image back-projection technique for determining the orient of a pallet without any fiducial marks is suggested in tins paper, which projects two feature lines on the front plane of the pallet backward onto a virtual plane that can be rotated around a given axis in 3D space. We show the fact that the rotation angle of the virtual plane on which the back-projected feature lines are parallel can be used to describe the orient of the pallet front plane. The position of the pallet is determined by using ratio of the distance between the back-projected feature lines and their real distance on the pallet front plane. Through a test on real pallet images, we found that the proposed method was applicable to real environment practically in real-time.