At present, the 5×7 dot matrix spraycode character recognition on the surface of tire rubber has many problems, such as high labor intensity, low efficiency and low intelligence level. Based on machine vision, a novel character recognition method for tire rubber surface is proposed. Firstly, the character occurrence area is stable and the character is white on black background for fast positioning, background segmentation and using morphological manipulation to remove interference. Then, the simplified vertical projection method is innovatively used to fit the threshold of character width, and the special cases of “1“and “I” which are different from other character widths are processed to achieve character segmentation. Finally, the template matching method based on standard correlation matching is used to realize character recognition. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is 9951%, which achieves the expected recognition effect.