At present, there is no appropriate way to measure the transverse vibration response of moving hoisting vertical rope in hoist. Therefore, a vision-based measurement method combining the digital image correlation (DIC) and digital image processing (DIP) algorithms is proposed in this paper. In this method, a reference line perpendicular to the vertical ropes is added in image sequence by DIP algorithm to form some virtual cross targets, which makes the improved DIC algorithm with adaptive template updating (ATU) rule can track the moving hoisting vertical rope without any labels. Then for distinguishing all ropes in the measuring area, a displacement threshold is set to locate the current measured rope and exclude the other ropes. The transverse vibration displacements of the hoisting vertical rope in an actual mine hoist was measured in three background situations, verifying the feasibility of the proposed method. Moreover, in a laboratory artificial vibration test, the measurement results from the proposed vision method and a laser displacement sensor yielded a very good agreement. The two experimental results indicate that it is fairly reasonable and effective to measure the transverse vibration displacements of hoisting vertical ropes.