In terms of the pros and cons of rice quality，the recognition method that combines the BP neuralnetwork with PCA(Principal Component Analysis ) algorithm is proposed to recognise rice. Principal component analysis is adopt to analyze the rice characteristic variables so that representative principal component can be extracted. Then the adaptive BP neural network is trained to learn that with principal component as its input. Finally，thetrained neural network is used to recognize rice quality in actual manipulation process，meanwhile，the additionalmomentum method and adaptive adjustment rate strategy are used to optimize the whole network. The simulationand experimental results show that the proposed recognition method makes the recognition accuracy reach over 95 %and shortens the learning time efficiently.