In view of the shortcomings of the automobile license plate identification systems, such as the low identification accuracy and efficiency under practical conditions, a new identification system based on the BP network is designed. In terms of engineering application,the character identification of automobile license plates is addressed in detail, including building the training sets of samples, image binarization, normalization, removal of noise,and neural network construction. The experimental results show that the system has good performance even when the  images have low quality and the license plates are located in a complicated natural scene.