Recognizing occluded vehicle targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is addressed. Recognition algorithms, based on local features, are presented that successfully recognize highly occluded objects in both XPATCH synthetic SAR signatures and real SAR images of actual vehicles from the MSTAR data. Extensive experimental results are presented for a basic recognition algorithm, using SAR scattering center relative locations as features with the XPATCH data and for an improvedManuscript