The invention discloses a neural network image classification and recognition method based on an optimized KPCA algorithm, and the method comprises the steps of calculating the cosine similarity of different vectors in a high-dimensional space, carrying out the dimension reduction of an original matrix of the KPCA algorithm through matrix rank minimization, reserving the effective information of original data to the maximum degree, and extracting better feature vectors to serve as weight values of convolutional layers, therefore, the problems that when an original KPCA algorithm is used for convolutional neural network image classification prediction, convolution kernel initialization calculation is complex, dimensionality disasters are likely to be caused, reliable features cannot be extracted, a whole network is difficult to train, and a network architecture is sensitive to image noise are solved. Therefore, the robustness and prediction performance of the whole network model are improved, and the effect of image classification and recognition is finally improved.