Abstract: The detection and identification of nonlinear targets havea great significance in the fields of national defense, anti-terrorism, security, rescue, and traffic safety. In order to improve the detection and recognition ability of nonlinear targets in the above scenarios, taking a typical nonlinear device, Schottky diode, as an example, a harmonic scattering model of nonlinear targets is constructed. On this basis, using the characteristics of different harmonic intensity and variation trend of different types of nonlinear target scattering, a method of extracting and analyzing the target scattering characteristic parameters by using mathematical methods to realize the detection and recognition of nonlinear targets is proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a recognition rate of 81% for unknown nonlinear targets under small samples, which proves that the method has better detection and recognition ability for nonlinear devices.