A solution is proposed for the real-time vehicle verification which is an important problem for numerous on- road vehicle applications. First, based on the vertical symmetry characteristics of vehicle images, a vertical symmetrical histograms of oriented gradients (VS-HOG) descriptor is proposed for extracting the image features. In the classification stage, an extreme learning machine (ELM) is used to improve the real-time performance. Experimental data demonstrate that, compared with other classical methods, the vehicle verification algorithm based on VS-HOG and ELM achieves a better trade-off between cost and performance. The computational cost is reduced by using the algorithm, while keeping the performance loss as low as possible. Furthermore, experimental results further show that the proposed vehicle verification method is suitable for on-road vehicle applications due to its better performance both in efficiency and accuracy.