Bridge cracks affect the service performance of bridges. Crack detection is the key to bridge maintenance. At present, most of the bridge crack detection is manual detection. The inspection personnel visually inspect the cracks and manually record the cracks. It is costly in time. Bridge crack detection based on machine vision uses automated algorithms to identify cracks on bridge surface images. Recently, artificial intelligence technology greatly improves the speed and accuracy of automatic crack identification. In this paper, the bridge crack detection system based on machine vision and its application are introduced in detail. The advantages of this technology in bridge crack detection and the need for improvement are summarized.