High-accuracy rotary-angle measurement is critical for precise positioning and control of robots, machine arms, and machine tools in industry. Image-based measurement is a very promising technology for angle positioning owing to its simple system, low cost, and good robustness to environments. Image correlation, such as the zero-mean normalized cross correlation (ZNCC) method, can obtain high accuracy image-positioning results, but their efficiency is too low to directly use in industries. This paper proposes to measure the absolute rotary angle using a parameterized ZNCC (PZNCC) image correlation method. The PZNCC expresses the ZNCC coefficient by the image shift parameters explicitly, so that the precise-match point corresponding to the global ZNCC maximum can be efficiently obtained and no image-resampling process is required. As a result, PZNCC is approximately 5 times faster than the classic inverse compositional Gauss–Newton (IC-GN) algorithm. Experiments show that rotary angle measurement based on PZNCC can obtain absolute angle positions with an accuracy of 1.16 arcsec (RMSE).