In order to solve the problems of manual reading and recording of the digital numerals in the process of electronic scale calibration, a digital tube character recognition algorithm based on the template matching method is proposed; the quality of the electronic scale numerals image is improved through pre-processing, and the overall regular layout of the numerals is extracted; the overall numerals image is accurately extracted by the projection method into a single numerals image, and the decimal point is accurately extracted by the image subtraction method based on the area characteristics. Accurately extracted; through the selection of digital tube numbers to build a template so that it has the same shape characteristics with the digital scale, using the correlation coefficient method to calculate the maximum correlation coefficient of a single digital scale and the template image to realize the template matching to identify the digital scale; finally, the experimental platform is built to carry out the experiment of loading and unloading the weights, and the dynamic changes of the digital scale and the threading method is compared with the identification and verification of the algorithms. The algorithm achieves 100% recognition correct rate in a small number of 50 experimental pictures, and realizes accurate recognition; more than 50 experimental pictures for a large number of experimental verification until 500 experimental pictures, the recognition effect of the designed template matching algorithm is better than that of the threading method, and the recognition correct rate reaches 98%.