The present disclosure provides an image classification method for maximizing mutual information, device, medium and system, the method including: acquiring a training image; maximizing the mutual information between the training image and a neural network architecture, and automatically determining the network architecture and parameter of the neural network; and processing image data to be classified using the obtained neural network to obtain an image classification result. According to the present disclosure, the network architecture and parameter of the neutral network are automatically designed and determined by maximizing the mutual information based on given image data without burdensome manual design and saving human and computational resource consumption. The present disclosure can automatically design and obtain a neural network-based image classification method in a very short time, and at the same time can achieve higher image classification accuracy.