The invention provides an authentication device and an identification method of motor vehicle license plate sequence tags. The device comprises a housing, as well as an embedded computer main board, a camera, a multiple variable-focal lens, a multi-band multi-angle light source and a light source control circuit board, wherein a charge hole is formed in the bottom of the housing and used for holding a license plate to be identified; the multiple variable-focal lens is installed on the camera and faces downwards the production sequence tag area of the license plate; the multi-band multi-angle light source is composed of white light, blue light, infrared light and the like, and the angles comprise 30 degrees, 15 degrees and 5 degrees. The identification method comprises the following steps: acquiring the images of an identification object under the multi-band multi-angle light source according to a fixed flow through establishing an image characteristic sample library, carrying out image comparison analysis with the sample library, and analysing the confidence degrees of many times of identification to form a preliminary identification conclusion. The authentication device and the identification method provided by the invention are adaptive to the used white-base, blue-base and yellow-base license plates, and a comparison is carried out in an automatic manner, thus effectively reducing the interferences of human factors.