The application of machine vision technology to mechanical automation design is an inevitable measure to improve the comprehensive productivity of mechanical production manufacturing. In this paper, a mechanical automation system based on SOA architecture is designed to cover the image acquisition, processing, and recognition workflow of an image processing module based on machine vision. The binocular camera calibration is completed by the Zhang Zhengyou calibration method. The image is preprocessed by using algorithms such as the mean value method, segmented linear transformation and median filtering, and an algorithm is proposed to improve the ORB feature point extraction, which can extract and match the feature points quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile, a Harris corner point detection algorithm is proposed to improve the SIFT algorithm to enhance the accuracy of target recognition and localization. The designed mechanical automation system is applied to the lychee picking robot, for example, analysis, which shows that the overall recognition P-R value of the system reaches 0.953, and the classification accuracy is above 0.917. In the mechanical automation route localization, the lateral deviation is lower than 4.80cm. The maximum time for image processing and parameter transfer is 117.966ms, which indicates that the system involved in this paper is relatively stable in operation and has a better effect on the localization of the navigation line, which is of certain application value in the field of mechanical automation design.