The invention discloses an insulator defect identification method based on image identification. The method comprises the steps that image processing is carried out on collected pictures including insulator chains to obtain the central straight line of each insulator chain; the central straight lines are used as reference lines, pixels are used as units, traversal is carried out on the binary images of the insulator chains along the reference lines, and in each reference area where the number of the pixel points of the vertical lines of the reference lines is increased firstly and then is reduced and the distance between the vertical line with the most pixel points in the reference area and the vertical lines of the reference lines is larger than an average value, the coordinate of the vertical line with the most pixel points in the area on the reference lines is gained; the distance between every two adjacent coordinate points is calculated, if the distance between two adjacent coordinate points is larger than 1.7 times of a reference distance, insulators are missed here, and otherwise, the insulators are complete here. The method is based on the image identification, a manual identification method is replaced, intelligent insulator defect identification is achieved, workloads are greatly reduced, and labor cost is lowered.