Currently, the security of large civil engineering structures more and more people's attention, health monitoring study civil engineering at home and abroad is one of the hot topics of research. After a hundred years of research, the traditional structural health monitoring theories and methods continue to improve, and now there have been a lot to be able to use the results of the actual engineering and have been widely applied to large bridges and other structures, but there is a lot of its own defect. With the development of computer technology, people began to use computer vision to health monitoring, and gradually formed a monitoring method of mechanical vision. This paper introduces the significance and application health monitoring methods, and some of the traditional health monitoring methods are introduced. Then reviewed the development and the use of machine vision health status monitoring, and finally to crack measuring, for example, using wavelet recognition method for image recognition and analysis of fracture.