The invention discloses a multi-target detection and tracking method for a speed dome camera control strategy. The method mainly comprises the following steps: preprocessing acquired bolt video image data, removing surplus frames of image, carrying out foreground point detection on the [2, N] frame of image, updating a background model, carrying out communicated region analysis, computing target characteristics, computing and comparing similarity of targets in adjacent frames, carrying out multi-characteristic similarity fusion, carrying out optimal matching, finding out targets, updating states and updating target characteristics. The method has the advantages of improving the accuracy of target tracking, dealing with separation and integration events very well and finding out target IDs related to the events; in addition, the similarity accuracy can be effectively improved so that the precision in the matching process is improved, the matching accuracy is enhanced greatly and the mismatching rate is lowered greatly; the IDs of targets after integration and separation can be found again accurately; the algorithm real-time property is high, the operation efficiency is very high, the required memory is less, and therefore, the method can be implemented in a front-end embedded environment.