There has been difficulties in identifying objects by relying on the naked eye in various surveillance systems.
There is a growing need for automated surveillance systems to replace soldiers in the field of military surveillance operations. Even though the object detection technology is developing rapidly in the civilian domain, but the research applied to the military is insufficient due to a lack of data and interest. Thus, in this paper, we applied one of deep learning algorithms, Convolutional Neural Network-based binary classification to develop an autonomous identification model of both friend and foe helicopters (AH-64, Mi-17) among the military weapon systems, and evaluated the model performance by considering accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure. As the result, the identification model demonstrates 97.8%, 97.3%, 98.5%, and 97.8 for accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure, respectively. In addition, we analyzed the feature map on convolution layers of the identification model in order to check which area of imagery is highly weighted. In general, rotary shaft of rotating wing, wheels, and air-intake on both of ally and foe helicopters played a major role in the performance of the identification model. This is the first study to attempt to classify images of helicopters among military weapons systems using CNN, and the model proposed in this study shows higher accuracy than the existing classification model for other weapons systems.