Feature extraction is of great significance in workpiece recognition. In this paper, the image preprocessing is performed on the original image obtained by gray scale transformation and smooth denoising. An improved method of feature extraction is proposed. The SURF algorithm is an accelerated version of the SIFT algorithm, which cannot only ensure the stability of the detected feature points, but can also to a large extent speed up the extraction of the characteristics of the time. It can meet the real-time needs of the workpiece recognition process. The feature recognition method based on the improved SURF algorithm is used to identify the workpiece. Experiments show that the improved feature matching method is accurate for workpiece identification and the speed is good.