Abstract: In order to solve the problem of small target recognition caused by small size, less edge and texture information in the field of view for UAV in complex battlefield environment, a new model based on deep learning for small target recognition Deep Residual and Feature Pyramid (DRFP) was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the residual structure was used as the skeleton of the model, and the feature pyramid structure was used to achieve feature fusion. Secondly, the cross-entropy function with adjusting factor was used in the loss function to realize the focus of attention on difficult samples. Finally, a non-maximum Gaussian suppression algorithm was used to improve the detection rate of target-intensive areas. The experimental results show that the accuracy(mAP) of proposed single stage model is 83.16% using UAV-images towards vehicle recognition, which achieves the level of two stage network model. At the same time, the recognition speed meets real-time requirements.