Abstract Mobile laser scanning systems encounter difficulties in precisely locating the center of conventional targets within highway tunnels due to high vehicle speeds and complex environments. This study designed a planar target suitable for highway tunnel scanning, and proposed a robust target center positioning method based on this planar target. Firstly, combined filtering, euclidean clustering segmentation, and shape constraints are used to accurately extract monomer target, then, the time distribution characteristics of the target point cloud are used to extract the target boundary, and then, the standard boundary template with a center point is matched with the extracted boundary to achieve robust template matching to locate the center of the target, finally, the reliability of the proposed method is verified in a 3.5 km long highway tunnel, and its accuracy is compared with the traditional centroid method. The experimental analysis results show that the target in this paper has strong adaptability to the environment, compared to the centroid method, the method in this paper achieves accurate center positioning of incomplete targets, when the target is complete, the center positioning accuracy of both the method and the centroid method is 1-3 cm, when the target is incomplete, the center positioning accuracy of the method in this paper is improved by 1-4 cm compared to the centroid method.