•Introduce image block technology to equally divide the overlapping leaf images and label the image sub-blocks.•Use genetic algorithm to optimize support vector machine, and compare and analyze the recognition performance of single texture feature or texture combination of different fusion strategies, and get the optimal feature fusion strategy.•An image block reconstruction method based on the comparison of the center point and eight-neighbor label value is proposed, and this is combined with the proportion of image blocks of two labels for comprehensive judgment. For the problem of a low recognition rate and shape feature failure caused by overlapping seedlings and weeds during the development of an intelligent lettuce weeding robot, a method to identify seedling lettuce and weeds based on an image block and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed, which realizes their precise identification and boundary segmentation. The a* channel is used to grayscale the collected image. The Otsu and morphological methods are selected to extract all the green targets in the image. The connected component analysis method is applied to label the green targets with regions of interest (ROIs), and those with pixel areas larger than the area threshold are normalized to 256 × 256 pixels. The image blocking technique is introduced to separately aliquot the normalized ROI, with block sizes of 16 × 16, 32 × 32, and 64 × 64 pixels. On this basis, the image sub-blocks are manually labeled, block by block, to extract three texture features: histogram of oriented gradient (HOG), local binary pattern (LBP), and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). With the accuracy of fivefold cross-validation as the optimization objective, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the SVM penalty and kernel parameters of 21 groups of research objects (one block size has three texture features, which are arbitrarily combined to form seven research objects, with a total of three block sizes). We compare the recognition performance of the SVM, RF, KNN, and GA-SVM classifiers in a single feature and a combination of fusion strategies through comparative analysis. When the block size is 32 × 32 pixels, the fusion of LBP and GLCM features under the GA-SVM classifier has the highest accuracy, and the optimal SVM model for the identification of lettuce and weeds in the seedling stage is obtained. For the misidentified image sub-blocks in optimization model recognition, an image block reconstruction method based on the comparison of the center point and eight-neighbor label value is proposed, and this is combined with the proportion of image blocks of two labels for comprehensive judgment. The center point label value is reconstructed to the improve recognition accuracy. Experimental results show that the average precision, recall, and F1 score of the proposed method are 0.9473, 0.9529, and 0.9498, respectively, and those of images without overlapping leaves can all reach 1, thus providing a theoretical basis for crop recognition and segmentation.