In this paper, we present a real-time algorithm for recognizing the vehicle color from the indoor and outdoor vehicle images based on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) acceleration. In the preprocessing step, we construct feature victors from the sample vehicle images with different colors. Then, we combine the feature vectors for each color and store them as a reference texture that would be used in the GPU. Given an input vehicle image, the CPU constructs its feature Hector, and then the GPU compares it with the sample feature vectors in the reference texture. The similarities between the input feature vector and the sample feature vectors for each color are measured, and then the result is transferred to the CPU to recognize the vehicle color. The output colors are categorized into seven colors that include three achromatic colors: black, silver, and white and four chromatic colors: red, yellow, blue, and green. We construct feature vectors by using the histograms which consist of hue-saturation pairs and hue-intensity pairs. The weight factor is given to the saturation values. Our algorithm shows 94.67% of successful color recognition rate, by using a large number of sample images captured in various environments, by generating feature vectors that distinguish different colors, and by utilizing an appropriate likelihood function. We also accelerate the speed of color recognition by utilizing the parallel computation functionality in the GPU. In the experiments, we constructed a reference texture from 7,168 sample images, where 1,024 images were used for each color. The average time for generating a feature vector is 0.509ms for the $150{\times}113$ resolution image. After the feature vector is constructed, the execution time for GPU-based color recognition is 2.316ms in average, and this is 5.47 times faster than the case when the algorithm is executed in the CPU. Our experiments were limited to the vehicle images only, but our algorithm can be extended to the input images of the general objects.