In order to solve the problem of manual counting in the process of driving anchor rods into ground, an automatic counting method based on target tracking is proposed. First, an improved template matching method is proposed to track anchor drilling machine. Then, target information can be recorded and a target path diagram is generated. Finally, median filter is used to process tracking results and peaks in the path diagram are counted as the number of anchor rods. It's demonstrated that the improved template matching method enables to accelerate matching process while keeping pleasure tracking accuracy and counting precision. In addition, a software system adopted this method has been put into practice.