In this paper an approach is presented for robust shift detection of two given images. The new unifying idea is that we determine a shifted delta impulse using some well-known restoration techniques, e.g. the Wiener filtering, constraint restoration, entropy restoration, and Baysian restoration. The used restoration techniques imply the robustness of the presented method. Our approach is a generalization of the matched filtering approach. Additionally, we describe in the paper the problem of calculating an evaluation measure of the restored delta impulse image. This measure is the basis for the uncertainty of the detected shift. The unifying approach of shift detection by restoration (SDR-method) could be tested successfully for a series of practical applications.