The invention discloses a color single pixel imaging method and system based on a random cyclic matrix. The imaging system comprises a DDR2 SDRAM additionally installed on a Discovery 4100 developmentboard, an onboard FPGA, a spatial modulator, a signal acquisition and processing module, a signal recovery and reconstruction module and a light path formed by a lens and a spectroscope. A measurement matrix is used to control the spatial modulator to further code light signals, a mode of compression while sampling is adopted to process data, the advantages of the spectroscope of quick decomposition rate and good real-time performance are combined, a color single pixel imaging system is formed, the difficult problems brought by massive data in the traditional imaging device in signal transmission and storage can be solved, a block adaptive step-size gradient projection recovery algorithm is used to enable the quality of the image to be greatly enhanced, and the resolution can reach 256*256.