In the basketball game, the accuracy and standardization of pitching are directly related to the score. So it is very important to analyze the pitching figure movement to have a better positioning of the fingers. There are limited techniques to recognize the movement. The human motion recognition method is one of them. It utilizes the spatiotemporal image segmentation and interactive region detection to recognize images of pitching finger movement of basketball players. This method has a limitation that the symmetrical information of the human body and sphere cannot be excavated, which leads to certain errors in recognition effect. This paper presents a method of recognizing pitching finger movement of basketball players based on symmetry algorithm, constructs an acquisition model, carries out edge contour detection and adaptive feature segmentation of images of pitching finger movement of basketball players, and uses a fixed threshold to segment finger image to extract players’ hand contour and locate the middle axis of the finger. On this basis, the symmetry recognition method based on nematode recognition algorithm is used to recognize the symmetry of basketball pitching finger movement image and complete the accurate recognition of basketball pitching finger movement image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively recognize the basketball player’s finger movement image. The average recognition accuracy is 98%, the growth rate of recognition speed is 98%, and the maximum recognition time is 12 s. The robustness of the proposed method is 0.45.