The invention relates to an image classification method based on a multi-core dense connection network. The method comprises the following steps: S1, establishing an image set; S2, constructing a multi-core density connection network model, wherein the multi-core density connection network model comprises an intensive connection unit, an attention unit and a classification unit, the intensive connection unit comprises at least two intensive connection modules, each intensive connection module comprises a plurality of bottleneck layers, each bottleneck layer comprises two convolution layers which are arranged in sequence, and each convolution layer comprises at least two convolution layers which are arranged in sequence, wherein the convolution kernels of the second convolution layer in thebottleneck layers in different dense connection modules are different in size; S3, training the multi-core dense connection network model to obtain a trained multi-core dense connection network model; and S4, inputting the test set into the trained multi-core dense connection network model, and outputting an image classification result. Compared with the prior art, the method has the advantages that depth features of different scales on the extreme image can be effectively extracted through convolution kernels of different sizes, and a better classification effect is achieved.