Images captured from optical holograms printed on goods, documents, personal identity cards, etc. would be distorted due to the imaging quality of the optical system and the influence of shooting conditions. A distortion correction method for the captured optical holograms is proposed. Firstly, an image pre-processing technique is used to extract the target hologram and the boundary of the target hologram is determined. Then four vertexes and midpoint positions of the hologram and the corresponding ideal points can be sought automatically. The holograms with projection distortion and nonlinear distortion are corrected by using different polynomial models. Compared with the other methods, the proposed one is simpler and faster, as it does not need the high-precision calibrating module and deals with an object′s hologram only in calibrating and recognizing process. The experiments show that the corrected holograms can be recognized clearly. The proposed method has the advantages of high efficiency, fast speed and high-recognition rate.