The traditional way of container terminal vehicle registration is manually, which is time-consuming and low efficient. In order to improve the efficiency, the most important thing is to reduce the vehicle registration time. For the designed automatic identification system, the carton number location is based on the axis scanning and vertical projection which can remove the interferential information effectively, and combining gray-level projection character segment method with Euclidean distance character recognition to improve the recognition effect. Taking vehicle images by cameras and making image processing by monitors, the system can identify the carton numbers,record the results in database, and then make decisions to control all the devices. The simulation results indicate that the system can record the carton numbers automatically, without vehicles stopping, improve the efficiency and reduce the congestion, meanwhile solve the problems of high cost and ununified standards which come from Radio Frequency Identification Devices(RFID).