The invention discloses a shape matching and target recognition method based on a PCA-SC algorithm. The method comprises the steps of carrying out preprocessing on a target image, filtering part of noises in the target image, extracting the edge of the target image, extracting information of boundary contour points, working out the rectangular coordinate parameters of the contour points, converting the contour points from rectangular coordinates into polar coordinates, obtaining a corresponding logarithmic polar histogram of each point to forming a local feature descriptor, forming a covariance matrix, extracting a corresponding feature vector of a larger characteristic value of the matrix, adopting a linear transformation method to drop the matrix from high dimension to low dimension, forming a new characteristic matrix, wherein the new characteristic matrix is used for the shape matching and the target recognition, calculating matching degree, and obtaining a matching degree value between the target image and each template image. According to the shape matching and target recognition method based on the PCA-SC algorithm, characteristic extracting and effective representation for the image can be achieved, scale invariance, rotation invariance and translation invariance are achieved, accuracy rate and efficiency are improved, and interference of the noise is effectively restrained.