An automatic target recognition system with adaptive metric selection. The novel system includes an adaptive metric selector for selecting a match metric based on the presence or absence of a particular feature in an image and a matcher for identifying a target in the image using the selected match metric. In an illustrative embodiment, the adaptive metric selector is designed to detect a shadow in the image and select a first metric if a shadow is detected and not cut off, and select a second metric otherwise. The system may also include an automatic target cuer for detecting targets in a full-scene image and outputting one or more target chips, each chip containing one target. The adaptive metric selector adaptively selects the match metric for each chip separately, and may also adaptively select an appropriate chip size such that a shadow in the chip is not unnecessarily cut off.