We propose a single-pixel non-imaging target recognition scheme which that exploits the singular values of target objects. By choosing the first few singular values and the corresponding unitary matrices in the singular value decomposition of all the targets, we form the measurement matrices to be projected onto the target in a single-pixel non-imaging scheme. One can quickly and accurately recognize the target images after directly recording the single-pixel signals. From the simulation and experimental results, we found that the accuracy of target recognition was high when the first three singular values were used. The efficiency of target recognition was improved by randomly rearranging the orders of the row vectors in the measurement matrix. Therefore, our research results offer a novel perspective for recognizing non-imaging targets.