Recognition of transformer bushing oil level based on infrared image suffers from over-reliance on temperature information and low efficiency on manual processing. In order to solve the existing problems,an intelligent bushing oil level recognition method based on improved single shot detection (SSD) with the combination of target detection technique is proposed in this paper. The bushing area in the infrared image is detected through introducing the SSD target algorithm. And SSD algorithm is improved by adding the center loss function. Furthermore,oil level detection of bushing is achieved through the application of simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) without relying on the temperature information. Comparative results among the image-based oil level recognition algorithm proposed in the paper and the manual oil level detection method,show that the efficiency of the proposed one is prior to that of the traditional temperature-based method. Moreover,the relative error of the algorithm is only 0.08%. Therefore,the proposed algorithm greatly improves the detection efficiency while ensuring the detection accuracy,so as to enhance the efficiency of bushing fault diagnosis and the degree of intelligence.