Abstract: Beam drift exists in underwater laser propagation. Influence of the beam drift on the images correlation recognition and the irrelevance between the random noise of inter-frame images were analyzed. The distortion-invariant matched filter design was studied, a phase-matching extraction of common features between distorted images was proposed, and the common features were used as the training samples of the synthetic discriminant function, based on which anti-distortion matching filter was designed and verified by a simulation. The Matlab simulation results show that the design of anti-distortion synthetic discriminant matching filter, combined with the pre-filtering of the image to be recognized, can effectively improve the PCE value (peak- the correlation energy ratio) of the correlation peak output and the disk values (peak identification rate).