The invention discloses an SAR image target recognition method which mainly solves the problems that in the prior art, feature dimensions of a sample are too large, computation is complex, and consumed time is long. The SAR image target recognition method is implemented in the following steps: (1) an SAR image is initialized to obtain a training sample matrix and a test sample matrix; (2) the Johnson-Lindenstrauss theory and limited equidistance RIP conditions are used for constructing a sparse measurement matrix; (3) according to the sparse measurement matrix, the training sample matrix and the test sample matrix are subjected to dimensionality reduction and normalization to obtain a normalized sample matrix; (4) according to the normalized sample matrix, a nearest neighbor classifier is used for obtaining a category label of the tested sample. Compared with the prior art, the SAR image target recognition method reduces the feature dimensions of the sample and computation complexity, increases SAR target recognition precision and arithmetic speed, and can be used for image processing.