Space object recognition plays an important role in spatial exploitation and surveillance, followed by two main problems： lacking of data and drastic changes in viewpoints. In this article, firstly, we build a three-dimensional （3D） satellites dataset named BUAA Satellite Image Dataset （BUAA-SID 1.0） to supply data for 3D space object research. Then, based on the dataset, we propose to recognize full-viewpoint 3D space objects based on kernel locality preserving projections （KLPP）. To obtain more accurate and separable description of the objects, firstly, we build feature vectors employing moment invariants, Fourier descriptors, region covariance and histogram of oriented gradients. Then, we map the features into kernel space followed by dimensionality reduction using KLPP to obtain the submanifold of the features. At last, k-nearest neighbor （kNN） is used to accomplish the classification. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is more appropriate for space object recognition mainly considering changes of viewpoints. Encouraging recognition rate could be obtained based on images in BUAA-SID 1.0, and the highest recognition result could achieve 95.87%.
