To solve the problem that high dimension of descriptor decreases the matching speed of Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm, an improved SIFT algorithm was proposed. The feature point was acted as the center, the circular rotation invariance structure was used to construct feature descriptor in the approximate size circular feature points' neighborhood, which was divided into several sub-rings. In each sub-ring, the pixel information was to maintain a relatively constant and positions changed only. The accumulated value of the gradient within each ring element was sorted to generate the feature vector descriptor when the image was rotated. The dimensions and complexity of the algorithm was reduced and the dimensions of feature descriptor were reduced from 128 to 48. The experimental results show that, the improved algorithm can improve rotating registration repetition rate to more than 85%. Compared with the SIFT algorithm, the average matching registration rate increases by 5%, the average time of image registration reduces by about 30% in the image rotation, zoom and illumination change cases. The improved SIFT algorithm is effective.