With the rapid development of image recognition technology, it has its applications in medical, security and other fields, but this technology has many areas to be improved, such as the accuracy of recognition, real-time and other issues, which have always been a hot research topic in this field. This article involves the development process of image recognition (traditional image processing, machine learning, deep learning), and focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of the popular YOLO algorithm in image recognition. Finally, it describes the technical problems faced by the current target detection technology and the corresponding solutions.