Edge computing is one of the important techniques in visual recognition system. In this paper, the application of edge computing in visual recognition system is introduced by taking the automobile water pump screw recognition as an example. The image is captured by an industrial CMOS camera, the workpiece image is adaptively filtered, and the image RGB to HSV conversion and equalization is carried out based on the feature color, which overcomes the interference of uncertain external factors; the edge computing method based on the feature color realizes the target localization, and the screw recognition method based on the Hough transform is designed, and tested and verified within the QtCreator platform. The results show that the proposed method can effectively recognize screws in the industrial production process with good detection accuracy and real-time performance.