In order to acquire the geographic location information of the target zone accurately and quickly, the location algorithm was developed for width area-array aerial camera processing passive target location. The paper uses camera's position and attitude information measured by position and orientation system which was rigidly connected with camera to regain beam's space position. Then paper chooses the suitable object coordinate system and builds collinearity equation by coordinate transformation to calculate the location information by single photo and target elevation information. Error model is built and simulated by total differential method and Monte-Carlo method respectively. The geo-location algorithm is verified by the flight test, when the plane flies at an altitude of 5 000 m, the location error is less than 30 m, which meets the requirement of the project. © 2018, Science Press. All right reserved.