A method for detecting and recognizing surface defects of an automated fiber placement composite based on an image converted from point clouds, including: acquiring a surface point cloud of the automated fiber placement composite; fitting a plane to surface point data; calculating a distance from each point of the surface point cloud to a fitted plane; enveloping the surface point cloud by OBB, and generating a grayscale image according to the OBB and the distance; constructing a pre-trained semantic segmentation network for defect of fiber placement, and inputting the grayscale image to segment and recognize defect areas thereon; mapping a segmentation result output by the semantic segmentation network to the point cloud followed by defect evaluation and visualization.