The invention provides a radar target recognition method based on a sparse feature. The method is used for improving the pertinence of data recognized by a radar target and reducing the computation burden of data processing by taking the sparse feature of a radar target image as a radar target image training sample and the recognition feature of a radar target to be measured; then, a sparse linear equation of the radar target to be measured is established according to the sparse feature of the training sample; then, the sparse linear equation is solved by using a Bayes compressed sensing algorithm, and the radar target to be measured is recognized by means of a compressed sensing theory instead of target azimuth estimation, so that the recognition complexity is lowered, and the recognition accuracy is prevented from depending on the target azimuth estimation; and meanwhile, the radar target recognition based on the compressed sensing theory also has favorable recognition performance under a noise environment, thus the problems that a radar target recognition system in the prior art is more complex and limited in recognition accuracy are solved, and the aims of increasing the processing efficiency for radar target recognition and improving the recognition accuracy are achieved.