In order to apply the imagery of birds, animals and stone in the Southern Song Dynasty to the art design, the paper used image recognition technology to identify the stone image in the tomb. Firstly, the image pre-processing method of stone carving in Southern Song Dynasty tombs in Southern Sichuan was proposed based on morphological transformation and other techniques. Secondly, a specific feature extraction and selection scheme was proposed for the specific features of the tomb stone image. In the study of key aspects of the template matching method of image recognition technology, the tomb stone image automatic recognition system was realized. The research shows that this paper proposes the effectiveness of the Southern Song Dynasty tombs stone image recognition system, and its accuracy and recognition efficiency are higher than those of artificial recognition, which lays the foundation for the use of stone image in art design. © 2018, SHPMedia Sdn Bhd. All rights reserved.