Aiming at the problem of automatic recognition of irregular shaped and lower height plane targets under the complex background, a template matching method based on Hausdorff distance was proposed. After the forward looking template of plane target was prepared, a similarity measurement method was defined based on edge position, gradient phase and edge point significance constraints firstly. When the positions of two edge points in template and real-time image were close, the gradient phase difference was small and the edge point in real-time image was significant, the two points were matched to each other; then a kind of Phase and Confidence Restrict Hausdorff Distance(PCR-HD) template matching method was designed through the fusion of above three metrics, which achieved the exact matching of plane target contour. The processing results of measured data show that, the proposed algorithm can realize contour matching and recognition of plane target with arbitrary shape under complex ground scene, and has high location accuracy, good robustness and wide application range.