Deformation of the image caused by interference for the complex environment of the sea can bring some difficulty to the UAV’s recognition of the artificial sign in the process of landing on a ship. A recognition method based on affine invariant moments and Support Vector Machine(SVM) is proposed. Firstly, some artificial sign samples under various deformation are collected. After preprocessing, affine invariant moments are extracted, and then are put into SVM classifier to complete artificial sign recognition. Finally，the realization based on the method within Digital Signal Processor(DSP) system is given. Experimental results show that the recognition rate is as high as 90% and the average frame test time is about 170 ms for the images in a variety of small amplitude distortion. So it exhibits a certain practicality for autonomous landing of Rotor UAV.