Aiming at the problem of target recognition in image processing,a novel algorithm based on visual perception with better information processing mechanism was proposed for target recognition, in which the hierarchical information processing mechanism of receptive field were simulated and the lateral inhibition mechanism which was used to filter response of neurons was introduced. Firstly, in receptive field of simple cells, the images are initially processed. Secondly, in receptive field of complex cells, stimulation of receptive field from former layer is further feature extracted, and then a new receptive field is obtained. And finally, the neurons which are strongly responded to the stimulation are found out by lateral inhibition mechanism, and their correspondent content can be output as the standard of aerial target recognition, the recognition rate of algorithm is 95.56％. Experimental results show that this novel algorithm has high efficiency, and can achieve a great number of target recognitions with few samples, and the recognition rate is higher than that of edge detection and image segmentation method.