Abstract: To accurately and rapidly identify the rice plant hoppers, a novel method for identification of the rice plant hoppers was proposed by using image processing and image spectra analysis. At first, the automatic digital image acquisition device developed by us was used to capture the hopper images. The threshold 140 was utilized for the segmentation of the background and the insects after statistic and analyzing gray values of the pixels in the background and the insects. Then morphological filting, opening and AND operations were conducted on the insect images and the back images of each insect were obtained. Two-dimensional Fourier spectra for back images of the insects were extracted through the Fourier transform. Finally, the fisher discriminant function was established based on the two-dimensional spectrum data and was used for the identification of the rice plant hoppers. The training and validation results showed that the correct recognition rates for the rice plant hoppers were more than 90%, indicating that the proposed method has potential to automatically identify the rice plant hopper.