The invention relates to a twice plant specie recognition method based on the cosine distance and the center contour distance. The method comprises the processes of rough identification and precise identification; in the rough identification process, the average cosine distance of a leaf image to be identified and each type of leaf image in a training set is calculated; partial types with greater average cosine distance in the training set are selected as the candidate types of the leaf image to be identified; in the precise recognition process, the center contour distance vector of the leaf image to be identified and the leaf image in the candidate types is extracted; then, the average similarity of the center contour distance of each type of leaf image in the candidate types and the center contour distance vector of the leaf image to be identified is calculated, so that the leaf image to be identified is precisely identified. The speed of the plant specie recognition method is accelerated; the precision of the plant specie recognition method is improved.