The invention relates to a transformer station pointer type instrument identification method based on angle step length and belongs to the instrument identification technology field. According to the method, a Hoff gradient method is employed to extract a circular scale contour, a matching traversal point P is selected on the to-be-detected circular scale contour, a corresponding dynamic ROI of the matching traversal point P and an Hu invariant moment of the dynamic ROI are acquired, image similarity is calculated according to the Hu invariant moment of the dynamic ROI and an Hu invariant moment of a pointer template, after the largest image similarity is acquired, the position of a pointer on a to-be-detected pointer instrument image can be determined, a pointer reading corresponding to the to-be-detected pointer instrument image can be acquired according to the pointer position, a scale of the to-be-detected pointer instrument image and corresponding measuring range relations, traversal matching is carried out through employing the angle step length, plenty of irrelevant area matching searching can be avoided, traversal frequency is substantially reduced, and identification precision and reliability are improved.