The key to automatic verification system for high precision pointer instrument based on table searching is the relatively fixed position of camera and instrument dial. Previous studies used mechanical fixture to fix the position of the instrument. However the shell sizes of different batches of instrument contain dimension errors, which causes poor robustness and reading recognition inaccurate. In order to solve this problem, template matching is employed to make sure the accurate alignment of the camera and instrument dial. Experiments demonstrate that the robustness and generality of the system is significantly improved by the proposed method.