The invention relates to a vehicle tracking method based on video analysis and belongs to the technical field of intelligent traffic management. According to the method, a license plate is taken as a characteristic, a vehicle is tracked in a tracking frame acquired through calculation on the basis of the license plate, interference of the complex crossing background can be effectively eliminated, and the vehicle can be efficiently and precisely tracked by utilizing the license plate characteristic. The method further has advantages of rapid speed and high tracking accuracy and is suitable for popularization and application.