For the intelligent tea picking machine, the positioning of tea tips was a difficult procedure. A positioning method based on active computer vision and corresponding visual system were proposed to solve this problem. First, according to the characteristics of the tea picking surface, a cross light path of projection and camera was designed; then the recognition approach of tea tips based on the color factor was developed in natural environment; furthermore, fringe projection profilometry was studied to acquire the height information of tea tips. In fringe projection profilometry, the temporal phase unwrapping method was used to obtain the phase maps, the invalidity identification framework and morphological filter were designed to remove noise points, and a polynomial approximation method which can reduce the nonlinear error was applied to calculate the height. The experimental results show that the positioning system for tea tips based on fringe projection technology can effectively recognize the tips and extract their three dimensional information, which can help new tea picking machine to realize the positioning function.