Human Vision system is the most complex and accurate system. In order to extract better features about S ynthetic Aperture Radar (S AR) targets, a S AR automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithm based on human visual cortical system is proposed. This algorithm contains three stages: (1) Image preprocessing (we use a Kuan filter to do the enhancement and an adaptive Intersecting Cortical Model (ICM) to do the segmentation) (2) Feature extraction using a sparse autoencoder. (3) Classification using a softmax regression classifier. Experiment result of MS TAR public data shows a better performance of recognition.