To meet the requirements of real-time statistics of the stream of people, a head detection algorithm is presented. The method isolates the region with moving persons by the moving target detection in the binocular camera images, a rapid matching method mixed region matching and feature matching is used to this region. Using the continuity of disparity, we just need to match the strong texture points by sum of absolute differences (SAD) method and simply verify the disparity to other points, so we can get the dense disparity map, and then calculate the depth map by the triangle projection relation. As the depth distributions between people and secne are different in the depth map generated by binocular stereo imaging, we can use the mathematical morphology operations to precondition, then get many candidate contours by edge detection. The characteristics of the head are used to determine whether the contour is the head. Experiments show that this algorithm can be well adapted to head detection in complex scenarios with high precision and speed.