Abstract: A method to detect ellipses and circles rapidly is proposed by invariant moments.According to the coordinates of discrete points,the centroid coordinates of ellipses and circles are calculated firstly.Then nor- malized central moments are computed.Based on the normalized central moments,the characteristic parame- ters are obtained.In this paper a method for ellipses and circles recognition,which is not confined by any con- ditions can be used for quick ellipses recognition of all sizes and orientation.The experimental results show that this approach is effective.