The accurate judgement of fruit maturity is significant for modern agriculture. At present, few scholars have monitored and recognized fruit maturity based on the Internet of things (IoT) and image recognition technology. Therefore, this paper explores the image recognition of fruit maturity in the context of agricultural Internet of things (IoT). Firstly, the single shot multi-box detection (SSD) algorithm was improved for fruit recognition and positioning, and used to determine the size and position the fruits to be recognized. Next, an image fusion algorithm was designed based on improved Laplacian pyramid, which effectively compresses the large fruit monitoring images shot in the same scene. The proposed algorithm was proved feasible and effective through experiments.