Abstract: Absolute orientation is one of the fundamental issues in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. It is also an important topic in computer vision and three-dimensional reconstruction. To overcome the problem of large rotation angles between model coordinates of images and the corresponding world coordinates in close range applications, a new method of absolute orientation which is suitable for large oblique angle image is proposed. Singular value decomposition of rotation matrix is used to obtain accurate initial values of the angular elements. Least squares adjustment with gross error detection is also performed to achieve precise results of absolute orientation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and has well potential in various absolute orientation applications.