In view of the current situation that most of apple sorting in China is still manually screened, a rapid detection method is proposed for apple defects based on machine vision. According to the number of defect candidate areas, the preliminary judgment of apples is completed, and the weighted correlation vector machine is used to further judge the defective apples. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method are verified by experiments. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of this method for 1 000 test samples is 99.1%, and the detection accuracy of various defects is high.