Abstract: Vision plays an important role in both the human interaction and human-nature interaction. Furthermore, equipping the terminals with the intelligent visual recognition and interaction is one of the core challenges in artificial intelligence and computer technology, and also one of lofty goals. With the rapid development of visual recognition techniques, in recent years the emerging new techniques and problems have been produced. Correspondingly, the applications with the intelligent interaction also present a few new characteristics, which are changing our original understanding of the visual recognition and interaction. We give a survey on image recognition techniques, covering recent advances in regarding to visual recognition, visual description, visual question and answering (VQA). Specifically, we first focus on the deep learning approaches for image recognition and scene classification. Next, the latest techniques in visual description and VQA are analyzed and discussed. Then we introduce visual recognition and interaction applications in mobile devices and robots. Finally, we discuss future research directions in this field.