The invention discloses a cloud image recognition method based on vocabulary tree retrieval and similarity verification. The method includes the steps of image obtaining, image uploading, image recognizing and similarity verification, wherein in the image obtaining step, a target image is obtained, all ORB feature points of the target image are extracted through the ORB algorithm to generate an ORB description subsequence of the target image; in the image uploading step, the ORB description subsequence is uploaded to a cloud image database based on description subsamples; in the image recognizing step, the cloud image database conducts matching recognition on the image through the retrieval algorithm based on a vocabulary tree, and N candidate images with higher matching degree are fed back; in the similarity verification step, the candidate images are found in the cloud image database to obtain 128 dimensional vectors of the target image and the candidate images, the distances between the target image and the candidate images are calculated respectively, and the candidate image with the shortest distance is found out. By means of the method, influences of a poor network on recognition speed are small, the retrieval speed is high, and the retrieval precision is high.