A novel method combing an Improved Chain Code Based Edge Tracking (ICCBET) with Pyramid Hough Transform (PHT) is proposed to detect the airport runway in real time successfully ,for the traditional line detection method by using chain code based edge tracking and Hough transform is sensitive to the noise and hard to satisfy the real time applications.The ICCBET is used to remove short and curving lines,reduce pixels,confirm approximate orientation and to shorten the angle range of PHT processes. Then,the computation cost is reduced considerably by using the stage of pyramid HT. Finally,a chain list array for the image is designed to fix the memory to avoid the overflow which arises from building chain list with memory dynamic allocation. The algorithm has been applied in the TMS320C6416 hardware system. The experiments on various images show that the computation cost by proposed method has decreased by 29 times as compared with that of traditional Hough method and it overcomes the blur and occlusion compared with the original chain code based edge tracking for line detection.