A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition approach based on KPCA (kernel principal component analysis) and Laplacian regularized least squares classification is proposed. KPCA feature extraction method can not only extract the main characteristics of target, but also reduce the input dimension effectively. Laplacian regularized least squares classification is a semi-supervised learning method. In the target recognition process, training set is treated as labeled samples and test set as unlabeled samples. Since the test samples are considered in the learning process, high recognition accuracy is obtained. Experimental results on MSTAR (moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition) SAR datasets show its good performance and robustness to azimuth interval. Compared with template matching, support vector machine and regularized least squares learning method, the proposed method gets more SAR target recognition accuracy. In addition, the effect of the number of labeled points on target identification performance is analyzed at different conditions.