Automatic Vehicle Number Plate Recognition (AVNPR) is an image processing technology which uses number (license) plate to identify the vehicle. The objective is to design a robust authorized vehicle identification system by using vehicle number plate. The system is implemented on the parking lots of highly secured are such as parliament office, or in universities etc. Further modification of this system could also make it useful in traffic law enforcement. The developed system first detects the vehicle and then captures the vehicle image. Vehicle number plate region is extracted using the image segmentation in an image. Optical character recognition technique is used for the character recognition. The resulting data is then used to compare with the records on a database so as to come up with the specific information like the vehicle’s owner, place of registration , address, etc. If it matches with the database information then the system triggers the gate to open otherwise it remains closed. The system is implemented and simulated in Matlab, and it’s performance is tested on real image. It is observed from the experiment that the developed system successfully detects and recognize the vehicle number plate on real images.