In order to realize automatic detection, identification and display lettered characters on the workpiece,automatic recognition system of workpiece is designed and achieved. The designed system can solve the problem that workpiece characters are difficultly recognized in the situation of the light abrupt changing. According to effects of different light sources combinations for character recognition performance, a novel algorithm of feature extraction is proposed to adapt light mutations. Firstly, the character details are enhanced by using homomorphic filtering operator.Then, contour and global features are respectively gained by utilizing adaptive threshold algorithm based on LOG while texture feature map is obtained by using local binary pattern (LBP). Finally, two feature in the same image position are combined by “OR” operator to gain light insensitive fusion feature. In the industrial circumstance, the extensive measurement results demonstrate that the recognition accuracy of detecting system reaches 94.72% and the average execution time is 230 ms. Compared to the SIFT and Bayesian algorithms, our system’s accuracy better satisfied the requirements of automatic recognition in industrial applications and the method has been used for industrial measurement.