The work aims to analyze the importance of automatic monitoring of fruit and vegetable maturity to the development of smart agriculture, and to review, summarize and prospect the research and application status of image processing and recognition technology in the field of fruit and vegetable maturity monitoring, in order to provide a reference for the development of online or automatic detection and identification technology of fruit and vegetable maturity in China. The principles and advantages of image processing and recognition in monitoring the maturity of fruit and vegetable were analyzed, and the research progress of neural networks in feature extraction and deep learning in this field was reviewed. The computer vision detection technology with image processing and recognition as the core had advantages in detecting the maturity of external features such as color and texture of fruit and vegetable, and the recognition rate of fruit and vegetable maturity detection by combining neural networks was high, which could promote the monitoring of fruit and vegetable maturity in picking, transportation and other scenarios. Image processing and recognition technology are expected to make further breakthroughs in the field of fruit and vegetable maturity monitoring, which will promote more and new application scenarios.