Abstract: According to the advantages of invariant moments extraction and support vector machine (SVM) classification,an efficient method of SAR image target recognition is proposed.Firstly,training sets of SAR images are preprocessed.Then in the target fields of SAR image,seven Hu's invariant moments are extract- ed,and average gray level values are also calculated.Following that,by using the vectors composed of nor- malized invariant moments and average gray level values,SVM is trained.Finally,the testing sets of SAR images are recognized by trained SVM.In the experiments of recognizing bridges and tanks,better results have been obtained with the new method.