DEM(digital elevation map) is a very useful information in various applications. In this paper, we have studied on the terrain matching algorithm using the DEM, which was proposed by Rodriguez and Aggarwal(1990) for an aircraft navigation system. We evaluated its performance using syntactic images. Cliff maps and critical points are used for the reduction of computation time and information size to be processed. The computer simulation shows that though the computational complexity is high, the technique is efficient even to noisy images.