This study proposes a method for automatic recognition and cutting of bank bills using windowed Hough transform: by scanning each pixel to compute the Hough transform of the image and extract the peaks of the Hough transform (which correspond to line segments). A rectangle is detected when four extracted peaks satisfy certain geometric conditions (which correspond the border of bills). Threshold is used to segment the source image and perform fitting correction for the segment result and the extracted Hough transform rectangles. The integration test results of on different image backgrounds and illumination environment indicate that the proposed strategy has a good ability to suppress the interference caused by different natural illumination and shooting angles. In addition, thumbnails view is used to extract feature, reducing the time complexity of pixel-by-pixel operation.