With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the upgrading of intelligent manufacturers, the development of intelligent manufacturing is now propelled by the replacement of inefficient traditional assembly machines and operators with machine vision (MV)-based industrial robots. The classic job recognition and positioning algorithm has multiple shortcomings, such as high complexity, manual design of similarity function, and susceptibility to noise disturbance. To solve these shortcomings, this study presents a fast job recognition and sorting method based on image processing. Firstly, the extraction approach for wavelet moment features and wavelet descriptors was introduced, and the feature fusion based on echo state network (ESN) was detailed. Then, the authors explained the idea of job template matching, and described how to measure similarity and terminate the measurement during template matching. Experimental results fully manifest the effectiveness of our strategy for fast job recognition and sorting. Our method offers a new solution to rapid recognition and sorting of objects in other fields.