Automated marine plankton image identification technique is a hot issue in the research of marine plankton ecology. By combining imaging systems and automatic classification software, these techniques are good at rapid identification and quantitative analysis on composition and abundance of plankton samples, which provides an efficient way to study the ecology and taxonomy of plankton continuously on a large scale. The development of planktonimaging systems, including ZooScan, Video Plankton Recoder, Underwater Video Profiler, FlowCAM, CytoSense and Holography, was reviewed. The techniques for automated identification of plankton images were introduced accordingly. The application of this technique in the field of marine ecosystem long term observation, size spectra and plankton biomass estimation was analyzed. The perspective and challenge were proposed finally. It is anticipated to promote the application of this technique in the research of coastal and oceanic plankton ecology and relevant fields in China.