The invention provides a special vehicle instrument type identification and calibration method based on image characteristics, and belongs to the field of image processing and mode identification. The method includes the steps of firstly collecting several special vehicle instrument images according to each type of several special vehicle instruments, and reserving representative images as training samples through manual judgment, secondly carrying out normalization to quality of the images through an image preprocessing method according to each training sample, then extracting a disk of the instrument images and carrying out the size normalization to the instrument images according to radius of the disk, thirdly respectively extracting color features and Gabor texture features of the special vehicle instrument images after the normalization, and finally aiming at all training samples, and building models for each type of instruments through respectively using of the color features and the Gabor texture features as vector quantities. After the feature models of the training samples of each type of instruments are built, with regards to the collected real-time images, the method can also be used to carry out image preprocessing and image quality normalization, respectively carries out mode match aiming at the feature templates of each type of instrument training samples with the two features, and obtains instrument classifying results through a nearest neighbour rule.