It is far essential to properly recognize the vehicle identification number (VIN) engraved on the car frame for vehicle surveillance and identification. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for recognizing rotational VIN images based on neural network which incorporates two components: VIN detection and VIN recognition. Firstly, with lightweight neural network and text segmentation based on EAST, we attain efficient and excellent VIN detection performance. Secondly, the VIN recognition is regarded as a sequence classification problem. By means of connecting sequential classifiers, we predict VIN characters directly and precisely. For validating our algorithm, we collect a VIN dataset, which contains raw rotational VIN images and horizontal VIN images. Experimental results show that the algorithm we proposed achieves good performance on VIN detection and VIN recognition in real time.