This paper aims to present a novel method for automatic target recognition based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In order to describe a region of interest (target area), we use a saliency attention model. Then, the produced saliency map is used as a mask on SAR image in order to separate the ground target from the background. After that, we calculate the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptors of the transformed SAR image. In this way, we maintain only the SIFT keypoints located in the salient region. This strategy leads not only to reduce the dimensionality but also enhances its discriminative power. For recognition step, a matching approach between vector descriptors of unknown image target and all known images stored in training data set is adopted. To validate the proposed approach, MSTAR data set is used. The obtained experimental results show that our approach can effectively describe a SAR image, and obviously improve the recognition rate.