For enhancing the target recognition effect of synthetic aperture radar image, a method of synthetic aperture radar image target recognition based on multi-linear principal component analysis and tensor analysis is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a four-order tensor training sample is constructed. Then, multi-linear principal component analysis is used to get the multi-linear projection matrix, and the core tensor is obtained from the multi-linear projection matrix. Finally, linear discriminant analysis is used to train the core tensor and classify the test samples. In the experiments, the proposed multilinear principal component analysis and tensor analysis method in this paper is applied to MSTAR public database for recognition experiments, and compared with principal component analysis and two-dimensional principal component analysis in recognition rate. Experimental results show that the method effectively preserves the image structure information and improves the target recognition rate.