The invention provides a remaining object detection method and device, and the method comprises the steps: firstly, judging the motion characteristics of pixels through employing a frame difference method according to the real-time rapidity requirement of remaining object detection, and finding a target object which is changed from dynamic to static, i.e., a suspected remaining object; Then, usingHOG features and SVM to performing classification, distinguishing people and articles, and filtering out the people; Judging whether the staying duration of the target object exceeds a preset duration or not by adopting an evidence accumulation mode; And finally, performing feature matching on the person near the target object and the owner of the target object, and if the person is not matched with the owner of the target object, determining the target object as a left object. On one hand, the calculation complexity is low, real-time performance and high efficiency are achieved; the method solves the problems of false alarm and shielding in the detection process of the left object, also solves the problem of distinguishing whether the left object is a person or an object, and also solvesthe problem of distinguishing whether the left object really has no owner, so that the detection accuracy is very high, and the detection problem of the left object is effectively solved.