Abstract: An active monocular vision for 3D stereo recognition and location system is built to work on robot manipulator. First to recognize and locate the target in 2D usin garea-based matching, then compute the depth distance using the method which combines stenopaic imaging arithmetic and parallel two eyes visual mode1. Test result showed that this method can correctly recognize the object and compute the 3D location. It can achieve high rates of 3D locating.