in order to improve the matching rate and detection speed of UAV images, an improved SIFT algorithm, Markov distance and cosine similarity matching algorithm is proposed in this paper. The improved wavelet transform method is used to preprocess the image, the circular neighborhood dimension reduction is used to improve the speed of the algorithm, and the Markov distance and cosine similarity are combined to improve the matching accuracy of the algorithm. The images taken by UAV are collected in the experiment, and the experimental results show that the accuracy and speed of the improved algorithm in the image processing are obviously improved.