A method to recognise head rice and break rice based on computer vision system was proposed,which can replace human visual observation.A computer vision based detection system was developed,which uses image processing methods,such as gray transformation,threshold segmentation and smooth processing etc,to get the image of rice kernel shape.The kernel shape was characterized by sixteen parameters,such as the area,perimeter,length and width etc.The data from the kernel profile were processed by the principal components analysis method.The first three principal components,standing for all the parameters of the shape,were taken as the input eigenvalues to train the BP neural net. Recognition experiments show that the accurate ratio of distinguishing head rice is 98.67%,and the accurate ratio of distinguishing break rice is 92.09%.