The invention relates to a respiration correction technique in positron emission tomography, in particular to a technique for correcting the artifact of respiration tomography on the basis of the sensitivity characteristics of a three-dimensional positron emission detector, belonging to the field of nuclear medical tomography. The correction method provided by the invention can effectively compensate for the image artifact caused by respiration, thereby improving the diagnostic accuracy of doctors. The correction method comprises the following steps: frame segmentation is carried out on the acquired dynamic data by using the variation characteristics of the geometric sensitivity of a scanning detector in the three-dimensional PET, wherein the number of intra-frame photons can reflect the phase position of the organ motion, and the number of photons of each phase position has a linear relation with the motion displacement thereof; accordingly, each phase position is moved to certain reference phase position point for correcting; and the image reconstructed at last constitutes the image artifact caused by the respiration in the PET improved by correction. Compared with the prior art like the gating correction technique, the method of the invention dispenses with hardware equipment and extra preparation by patients or clinic before scanning, therefore, the method is easier, more effective and more reliable in actual application.