In order to lessen picking time of apple harvesting robot,the fast tracing recognition method of target fruit for apple harvesting robot was researched. Firstly, the first collected image was segmented by the OTSU dynamic threshold segmentation method based on R-G color feature, and the picking target fruit was determined based on the principle of the nearest to image center. Next, the target fruit in the follow images were traced and recognized with the improved fast mean-residual normalized product correlation template matching algorithm while the region of image process idea was smaller frame-by-frame continuously according to the correlated information between the acquired images. At last, the comparative tests, which took into account of different threshold segmentation methods, different matching recognition by gray value, brightness and contrast, and the recognition time with the new and old methods, were done, and results from experiments indicated that the method used is viable, decreases by 36%.