According to its ability in remaining constant under scaling, translation, and rotation, the normalized 2D correlation technique is considered to be a powerful method in identifying targets through images. The presented work aims to investigate the role of scaling and translation upon the extracted target under different cases in locations and sizes. The originality of this work focuses on simulated such cases with the aid of the normalized 2D correlation method. Accuracy results in detecting targets demonstrate high rate values even when they display variations in both sizes and locations throughout the image. As well as resize ratio increases, the similarities between target under search and extracted ones improve at final. For all schemes, the elapsed time lies in the interval (44.75–44.85) seconds for Macaw bird and (37.48–37.73) seconds for children target, while the correlation coefficient demonstrates steady relations within (0.90–0.98) for Macaw bird and (0.87–0.93) for children targets. The strong similarity between the original target under study and the extracted one had a clear role in the results of the statistical variations with the resize ratio relationships which appeared through the lowest values of absolute difference, NMSE and the highest values of SSIM, and NSSIM which ultimately indicate a high degree of similarity.