In order to improve the working efficiency and environmental adaptability of apple picking robots, which can realize accurate recognition and localization, ripening assessment, and quality assessment under complex situations such as "leaf occlusion", "branch occlusion", "fruit occlusion", "mixed occlusion", etc., this paper proposes a Faster R-CNN-based apple recognition method. "mixed occlusion" and other complex situations to achieve accurate recognition and localization, maturity assessment, quality assessment, the paper proposes an apple recognition method based on Faster R-CNN. The method combines the cv2.inRange and cv2.fitEllipse functions in OpenCV to optimize the model, and performs color segmentation and shape fitting by setting up color and shape thresholds to recognize apples. The trained model was tested to have a recall of 88.44% under the validation set, an accuracy of 90.35%, an F1 value of 89.38%, and a recognition time of about 0.3 s per image.The experimental results showed that the number of apples in the dataset showed a normal distribution, with the number distributed more in the range of 0 to 10. Candidate frames are screened by RPN, and apple coordinates are derived based on the coordinate transformation formula, and the experimental results show that the apples are more densely distributed near the range of x=100, y=100. The image color distribution was extracted through color histogram, and the entropy value of GLCM, contrast as the texture feature of apples, and the classification prediction of apple ripeness was carried out by using Random Forest Model, and the accuracy of the model prediction was 83.2%, the precision rate was 84.1%, and the recall rate was 83.5%, and the experimental results showed that 88.7% of the apples were ripe. Image edges were extracted by the Canny edge detection algorithm and the area values of pixel points within the edges were calculated. The ratio of pixel area converted to apple mass was estimated to be 0.007 based on the image resolution and apple density, and the test results indicated that the mass of apples was mostly concentrated in the range of 0~100g.