The invention provides a video analysis method based on a local characteristic descriptor. The video analysis method mainly comprises video query, characteristic extraction based on deep learning, compact local characteristic descriptor encoding, video matching and video retrieval, and comprises the steps of firstly extracting a characteristic descriptor of a keyframe in a video, using a color histogram to conduct frame-level distance comparison, combining a manual design characteristic of a compact descriptor used for video analysis and deep learning based on a convolutional neural network, then achieving pair matching through comparison in a coarse-to-precise strategy, finally extracting a candidate keyframe in a database, and conducting sorting through video-grade similarity through further examination on local descriptor matching. In the video analysis method based on the local characteristic descriptor, the redundancy time of the video is eliminated, high-efficiency and low-delay mobile vision search is achieved, the memory size, the bandwidth resource and the cost during running are drastically saved, the compressibility is reduced, and the performance loss is lowered.