Near infrared spectroscopy combined with pattern recognition techniques were applied to develop a method of fast and nondestructive discrimination between Chinese ginseng and American ginseng. A total of 90 representative ginseng samples including root, fiber and powder were collected. NIR spectra of the samples were obtained directly with wrapped polyethylene packing film. MSC and first derivative were performed after the elimination of notable packing film absorbance in raw spectra. Then the informative wave bands were chosen by moving window partial least-squares regression method. PLS-DA, PCA-DA and SVM discrimination models were founded and their results were compared. SVM was proven to be the most effective method with 100% accurate identification rate for validation set. It indicates that the method founded is precise and convenient and can be practically used in practice for quality control and fast screening of raw herb materials.