Abstract: In order to quantitatively measure the velocity and study the motion characteristics of cut tobacco in an upright pipe, a detection method based on image registration algorithm was proposed according to the flexible filamentary particle characteristics of cut tobacco. Firstly, the pictures of cut tobacco group in the upright pipe were collected by a high-speed camera continuously. Secondly, the movement of cut tobacco in the pictures was registered via invariant center moment algorithm, and the pixel displacement of a single particle was calculated and transformed into its real displacement through camera calibration technology. Finally, cut tobacco velocity was determined according to its displacement and image time interval. The results showed that: 1) Under the same conditions, when the air velocity increased within the range of 12.5 m/s to 17.5 m/s, the increase of tobacco velocity was less than that of the air velocity, and the structure of the tobacco decayed rapidly with the proceeding of process. 2) When the air velocity was 15 m/s, the elevation process of cut tobacco was a process from acceleration to uniform velocity, and the acceleration gradually decreased to 0. 3) Under the same condition, for the cut tobacco with the characteristic size ranging from 3.29 mm to 3.67 mm, there was a velocity difference between different sizes of cut tobacco near two sides of the pipe, and the shorter the cut tobacco size was, the slower the velocity would be; there was also a velocity difference on the same horizontal section, the shorter the cut tobacco size was, the slower the average velocity would be.