The accuracy and validity of the traditional image correlation-matching algorithms are degraded, with the presence of the gray change, image clutter, object variation and occlusion. The reason of degradation is that they use the method of adding the differences of the pixels' gray value according to the corresponding position or calculating the number of the pixels having similar gray value as matching degree. A new image correlation-matching algorithm based on edge extraction is proposed. Firstly the new algorithm processes the image by extracting edge and thresholding, then calculates the correlation of the binary images using the defined ESD distance. Results show that the new algorithm is robust to more image distortions and has great value in target tracking application.