Image recognition is a brand-new recognition technology that has developed rapidly in recent years. Compared with early recognition methods, this recognition technology can resist strong electronic interference in practical application, and has the characteristics of good concealment, high accuracy and low cost, and has been widely used in many fields. Neural network is not only an intelligent algorithm with self-learning and self-organizing, but also plays a positive role in intelligent recognition and classification of image resources. The analysis features have many advantages in image processing, such as rotation, scale scaling, invariability of brightness change, and a certain degree of stability against angle change, affine transformation and noise, which is suitable for smart grid image recognition. In view of the good effect of SIFT algorithm in smart grid image recognition, this paper studies how to apply the unique advantages of SIFT feature description operator to smart grid image recognition system and solve the problems existing in smart grid image recognition at present.