The invention provides an image object recognition method based on SURF (Speed Up Robust Feature), comprising the following steps: first, preprocessing images; second, extracting SURF corners and SURF descriptors of the images to describe the features of the images; third, processing the features through PCA data whitening and dimension reduction; establishing a bag-of-visual-words model through Kmeans clustering based on the features after processing, and using the bag-of-visual-words model to construct a visual vocabulary histogram of the images; and finally, carrying out training by a nonlinear support vector machine (SVM) classification method, and classifying the images to different categories. After classification model building of different images is completed in the training phase, the images tested in a concentrated way are detected in the testing phase, and therefore, different image objects can be recognized. The method has excellent performance in the aspects of recognition rate and speed, and can reflect the content of images more objectively and accurately. In addition, the classification result of an SVM classifier is optimized, and the error rate of judgment of the classifier and the limitation of the categories of training samples are reduced.