The scan matching is widely used in localization and mapping of mobile robots. This paper presents a probabilistic scan matching method. To improve the performance of the scan matching, a direction of data point is incorporated into the scan matching. The direction of data point is calculated using the line fitted by the neighborhood data. Owing to the incorporation, the performance of the matching was improved. The number of iterations in the scan matching decreased, and the tolerance against a high rotation between scans increased. Based on real data of a laser range finder, experiments verified the performance of the proposed direction augmented probabilistic scan matching algorithm.