One of the most effective instruments for target detection in turbid waters is imaging sonar. However, the aspect angle of imaging sonar is usually small and that is a sacrifice for high detection precision. To make imaging sonar practical in large scale target detection with wide aspect angle, investigating image matching methods for continuous sonar frames is of great importance. A novel image matching method using local features of SIFT is described in this paper, which mainly focuses on the problem of weak echo signals and the following sonar images mismatch. The correspondence between objects and cast shadow regions is employed to extract regions of interest. Besides, status parameters of underwater vehicle are used to approximate the image transformation. Image segmentation methods are involved to decrease the size of the feature extracting regions and reduce the impact of non-target seabed areas, which improves the stability of this sonar image matching method significantly.