The invention discloses a Chinese character image lookup method on the basis of optical flow analysis. A Chinese character database directly stores Chinese characters in an image way, and a user inputs a Chinese character image during a lookup. After the user inputs an image to be looked up, the input image is aligned with each image in the Chinese character database through the optical flow analysis, and then, a distance between the input image and each image is measured. A plurality of images with a shortest distance are selected as lookup results.