This paper deals with the problematic of automatic target recognition (ATR) using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. In this work, the Deep Learning (DL) architecture is proposed and applied in order to recognize military vehicles from SAR images. We propose mainly in this work the deep learning algorithms based on convolutional neural network architecture. In the second step and in order to optimize the convolution of DL steps, we propose to use a convo- lutional auto-encoder which may be better suited to image processing. Its use provides several areas of the best results in the presence of noise on shifted and truncated images. To validate our approach, some experimentation results are given and compared. The obtained results show that the proposed approach of DL achieves a height recognition accuracy of 93%.