Shooting simulation systems not only reduce a great amount of expense and time for military exercises but also prevent accidents. In particular, the shooting simulation systems using laser beam have an advantage which is very similar to the shooting exercise that uses real bullets. However, real time technique for laser beam recognition in a target image is necessary. The method proposed in this paper takes a difference image from two adjacent image frames. Then a thresholding is applied on this difference image to discriminate laser beam from background. To decide the threshold value the intensity distribution of background points is modeled assuming normal distribution. Then a noise reduction and a region segmentation are applied on the binary image to find the position of a laser beam. The time complexity of this process depends on the size of an image multiplied by the size of a mask used in the noise reduction process. The experimental result showed that the accuracy of the system was 93.3%. Even in the inaccurate cases the beam was always found in the resultant region.