Captured circular marks are deformed sometimes when Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) is used to detect various defects on Printed Circuit Boards (PCB), which may affect the precision of inspection. A new accurate positioning method of circular marks is proposed to solve the problem by obtaining the center of the most round ellipse based on the criterion that the ratio of the difference between the length and width of its circumscribed rectangle and the width of the rectangle is less than 0.1. The simulation tests show that, if the mark has much more deformations, the center positioning error of the proposed algorithm is about 0.013 pixels, and the running time is less than 40ms. Therefore, the proposed method provides good characteristics such as speediness, strong anti-interference ability and robustness.