The rapid expansion of images in the living world and the evolution of their forms are based on the advanced visual technology and its achievements, developing gradually around the axis from visual cognition to visualization cognition. The image form continuously expands and transforms in time and space, and has gone through three stages: conventional image, coded image, and digital virtual image. The wide application of technologies such as video communication, holography and computer graphics has spawned a new “machine imagination,” opening the new visualization (intellectualized) cognitive mode of “human-machine fusion” or “human-machine integration,” thus leading image philosophy into a new historical landscape. Visualization cognition brings people unprecedented mental images and brand-new life experience. We should realize that the new visual technology brings many changes and much convenience to human cognition and the living world, in the meantime, it also poses severe challenges to the belief of traditional visual cognition, the significance of subjectivity, and human-machine relationship.