To provide a method and device for solid-body recognition which can obtain an identification result in a short time even when registered solid- body recognition data are very large in quantity.

The registered data are classified into ranks according to the number of bits 1 of the registered data. For matching, a rank is determined (step S3) first according to the number of bit data 1 of a solid body to be recognized. Then matching against registered data of the same rank as the rank of the object solid body to be recognized among the registered data is performed (step S5).