Aiming for the feature of the airfield runway in long range aerial photography infrared images,a novel threestep recognition strategy based on fractal theorywas presented. First, regions of interest (RO I) , are segmented based on fractal texture features according to supposition before verification. Then, latent airfield targets are performed over all sub imageswith morphological filters. Finally, the airfield target is recognized automatically according to the geometric characters and histogram statistic matching based on texture features. Experimental results on the real images demonstrated that the approach performs well in automatic recognition accuracy and computational efficiency.