As an important property of operation group, formation reflects the cooperative relationships among group members in space arrangement. It often indicates the intention of near future, identity and threat of enemy groups directly. In order to provide much more significant battlefield information and much better support for commanders' situation assessment and command activity, the problem of recognizing made-up lines of formations is researched. Based on Hough Transform, a template-based modeling method for these formations is proposed at first, then the pattern feature extraction strategy based on clustering of points in Hough Space is put forward. At the end of the paper, a formation recognition approach based on the matching between pattern features of a formation and these templates is suggested. Experiment results show that the method is effective.