A location method of vehicle license plate based on the energy filter principle and wavelet is presented. The energy function is constructed according to the high and concentrated energy in the horizontal direction,and the variance of the energy in the vertical direction is reflected to the projection. The vehicle license plate image is roughly located by energy filter. The details of the horizontal components and the vertical components are obtained from the frequency information with wavelet analysis. Then the detail image is analyzed by a series of morphological operations,the noise in these edge components can be greatly decreased. Finally the license plates can be accurately located by the projective method. The experimental results show that the accuracy of vehicle license plate location is about 96.2% ,and it only needs about 3.62 s.