Recognition of small moving targets in space has become one of the frontier scientific researches in recent decade. Most of them focus on detection and recognition in star image with sidereal stare mode. However, in this research field, few researches are about detection and recognition in star image with track rate mode. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to recognize the moving target in single frame by machine learning method based on elliptical characteristic extraction of star points. The technical path about recognition of moving target in space is redesigned instead of traditional processing approaches. Elliptical characteristics of each star point can be successfully extracted from single image. Machine learning can achieve the classification goal in order to make sure that all moving targets can be extracted. The experiments show that our proposed approach can have better performance in star images with different qualities. © 2021 World Scientific Publishing Company.