Sorting coal and gangue is important in raw coal production; accurately identifying coal and gangue is a prerequisite for effectively separating coal and gangue. The method of extracting coal and gangue using image grayscale information can effectively identify coal and gangue, but the recognition rate of the sorting process based on image grayscale information needs to substantially higher than that which is needed to meet production requirements. A sorting method of coal and gangue using object surface grayscale-gloss characteristics is proposed to improve the recognition rate of coal and gangue. Using different comparative experiments, bituminous coal from the Huainan area was used as the experimental object. It was found that the number of pixel points corresponding to the highest level grey value of the grayscale moment and illumination component of the coal and gangue images were combined into a total discriminant value and used as input for the best classification of coal and gangue using the GWO-SVM classification model. The recognition rate could reach up to 98.14%. This method sorts coal and gangue by combining surface greyness and glossiness features, optimizes the traditional greyness-based recognition method, improves the recognition rate, makes the model generalizable, enriches the research on coal and gangue recognition, and has theoretical and practical significance in enterprise production operations.