China is a great economy of pearl industry, but the current problems of pearl sorting and its intelligentization level are urgently needed to be solved. The research status on domestic mechanical automatic classification based on machine vision technology and the application of sorting manipulator were organized.The operation based on machine vision technology was emphatically analyzed. The research shows that the mechanical operation has a narrow development space in the future, and machine vision will be used primarily, which will further solve the problem of productivity and the classification accuracy.It is expected to realize the pearl shape online realtime detection and fast sorting by combining with the application of the manipulator.