An image feature extraction method based on swarm intelligence is used in the preprocessing of joint image in joint transform correlator.The swarm intelligence is superior to the conventional image processing method in its robust,flexible,fault tolerant,scalable,and highly parallelizable characteristic.The output results from the classical JTC without image preprocessing and the JTC with Sobel operator based joint image feature extraction are compared with that of the JTC using the swarm intelligence to extract the feature of joint image.Experiment results show the performance improvement of JTC using the feature extraction method based on swarm intelligence.