With the advantages of non-contact measurement, good real-time and sustainable work, machine vision technology has broad application prospects in the military field. Based on the overview of key technologies, such as machine vision optical lighting system, imaging system and visual information processing system, the application status of machine vision technology in typical scenes, such as typical target recognition, personnel identification, equipment defect detection, and typical military equipment in military field were analyzed in this paper. On this basis, the problems that still exist in the application of machine vision in the military field, such as the visual sensor hardware system is difficult to adapt to the extreme environment, the adaptability of complex military targets is insufficient, the real-time performance of target recognition is difficult to ensure, and the ability of multi-sensor fusion to obtain military target information is insufficient, all those were pointed out in detail. Then the future development trend of machine vision technology in military field was prospected. The results of this study can be used as a reference for the further practical application of machine vision in the military field.