Abstract Given the hurdles posed by existing techniques for identifying microscopic offsets in miniature printed circuit boards (PCBs), including their low accuracy and high iteration count, this study presents an innovative approach that measures micrometer offsets by utilizing the ORB feature-guided FREAK descriptor enhancement. It improves matching outcomes with a brute-force matcher and RANSAC via ORB feature extraction to guide FREAK descriptors for better feature uniqueness. A PCB small offset detection algorithm is developed with a homography matrix and a theoretical offset model. A novel distance threshold performance evaluation method for this suggested matching algorithm that objectively evaluates matching results is also proposed in this article. The proposed matching method outperforms alternative algorithms in precision and recall, according to its experiments. This research conducts simulation detection of PCB calibration bare boards and instance verification of real PCB boards by constructing a PCB tiny offset detection experimental system. The results show that micron-level detection precision can be achieved without iteration.