Corner detection is a fundamental step in visual measurement, and it is also an important factor which affects the real-time performance in measurement. In order to improve the real-time performance of corner detection, a fast detection method of checkerboard corners based on the combination of template matching and Harris Operator is proposed. First, template matching model is founded based on the characters of template's gray histogram. Then, the image is divided based on the measured parameters, and sub images containing checkerboard are extracted. Finally, the corners are detected with the Harris corner detection method. The actual test results indicate that the real-time performance is significantly improved in the case of maintaining the accuracy.