This study aims to explain the real‐time and high‐precision requirements of linear motor mover position detection. A new sub‐pixel displacement estimation based on an extended phase correlation algorithm (PCA) is proposed and applied to measure the position of the linear motor mover. This extended PCA is on the basis of singular value decomposition (SVD), which is a novel application in position measurement of the linear motor mover. First, two adjacent stripe images are captured by a high‐speed camera installed in the linear motor. Second, an improved Hanning (flap‐top) window function is added to the input fence images to suppress the edge effect and spectral aliasing, before the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Next, phase correlation matrix is acquired by PCA, and using SVD technique to calculate approximate rank‐one matrix for subsequent phase unwrapping. Then, weighted‐phase unwrap algorithm is applied to acquire the real horizontal phase data. Finally, least‐squares method is utilised to linearly fit the real phase data and to obtain sub‐pixel displacement of the linear motor mover. Experiments show that the detection accuracy is 1/100 pixel, and the position measurement of linear motor mover is fast and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]