Feature extraction techniques play an essential role in classifying and recognizing targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. This article proposes a hybrid feature extraction technique based on convolutional neural networks and principal component analysis. The proposed method is used to extract features of oil rigs and ships in C-band synthetic aperture radar polarimetric images obtained with the Sentinel-1 satellite system. The extracted features are used as input in the logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), naive Bayes (NB), decision tree (DT), and k-nearest-neighbors (kNN) classification algorithms. Furthermore, the statistical tests of Kruskal-Wallis and Dunn were considered to show that the proposed extraction algorithm has a significant impact on the performance of the classifiers. © 2022 SPIE.