Abstract This paper applies traditional cultural elements to modern interior design and first analyzes the expression types of traditional cultural elements. Secondly, the color and pattern elements in traditional cultural elements are extracted by color matrix and SIFT algorithm, and the pattern and color elements are applied to modern interior design using an intelligent recommendation algorithm. Next, the layout elements of traditional cultural elements are modeled, and the automatic layout algorithm is created to be utilized in modern interior design. Finally, the performance of extracting traditional cultural elements and their application are analyzed. The results show that the recognition rate of various colors is above 0.88, the extraction accuracy of the overall traditional cultural pattern elements is around 0.9, the overall degree of the graphic color element recommendation is greater than 0.88, the hierarchical difference between the traditional cultural layout and the intelligent layout is between [0.001, 0.01], and the functional difference is between (0, 0.02], and all of the automatic layout algorithms can be completed within 0.2s.