The invention provides an inscription rubbing-based calligraphy character segmentation and recognition method. The method comprises the following steps of 1, processing images in a training set; 2, pre-processing a training sample; 3, reading an image processed in the step 2 for model training, wherein a feature matrix MLH and a feature vector matrix Me are models trained according to rubbings; 4, conducting the word segmentation for the entire image, and segmenting calligraphy characters out of the image; 5, judging each character segmented in the step 4 belongs to which character in rubbings, obtaining a dimensionality reduction feature matrix MP of the image, calculating the similarity, calculating the distance Dist between MP and each row of MLH, and determining that characters in one row of MLH that is smallest in distance to be to-be-recognized characters. According to the technical scheme of the invention, the inscription rubbing-based calligraphy character segmentation and recognition method can effectively realize the segmentation of calligraphy characters, and is high in recognition accuracy and fast in recognition speed.