Abstract: A new speed measuring method for underground locomotive based on image processing technology was proposed to solve problems of high cost and fault rate of traditional method using sensors to measure speed. Firstly the centroid coordinate of template is obtained by template matching,then the moving distance of the template in two consecutive pictures is got by using the change of the centroid coordinate in the pictures. The moving distance is transformed into actual driving distance of locomotive through scale coefficients next,and the speed of the locomotive is calculated according to time gap between the two pictures. The experiment showed that the method can determine speed of locomotive real-timely and has a reliable performance.