In some cases, for instance, when a target is located at a long distance, when a target has low local contrast, when a target is obscured and when the pattern of a target zone occurs frequently, it is difficult for a direct recognition method to correctly recognize the target. For this reason, a recognition method for typical ground buildings based on indirect location of planar landmarks is proposed. At the ground preparation stage, the landmarks are selected and their reference images are prepared. At the flight stage, the landmarks are captured, recognized and located by a matching algorithm automatically. Then, the spatial constrains between the target and the landmarks are used to indirectly locate the local region of interest which contains the target. When the local region of interest has high contrast, the direct recognition based on morphological processing framework at final stage is started. The adaptability of the proposed algorithm is tested and analyzed in the simulation experiment.