The invention provides a visual inspection system for an instrument indicator lamp. The system comprises steps of positioning, contour extracting and identifying whether the color of the instrument indicator lamp is contained in a contour. According to the technical scheme, the problem of heavy worker memory workload, low efficiency, excessive manpower consumption or the like of a traditional inspection scheme is solved when the instrument indicator lamp of the panel state is currently inspected; and if AR patrol inspection and an automatic visual recognition algorithm are used, the system can realize high efficiency.