Locating critical objects is crucial in various security applications and industries. For example, in security applications, such as in airports, these objects might be hidden or covered under shields or secret sheaths. Millimeter-wave images can be utilized to discover and recognize the critical objects out of the hidden cases without any health risk due to their non-ionizing features. However, millimeter-wave images usually have waves in and around the detected objects, making object recognition difficult. Thus, regular image processing and classification methods cannot be used for these images and additional pre-processings and classification methods should be introduced. This paper proposes a novel pre-processing method for canceling rotation and scale using principal component analysis. In addition, a two-layer classification method is introduced and utilized for recognition. Moreover, a large dataset of millimeter-wave images is collected and created for experiments. Experimental results show that a typical classification method such as support vector machines can recognize 45.5% of a type of critical objects at 34.2% false alarm rate (FAR), which is a drastically poor recognition. The same method within the proposed recognition framework achieves 92.9% recognition rate at 0.43% FAR, which indicates a highly significant improvement. The significant contribution of this work is to introduce a new method for analyzing millimeter-wave images based on machine vision and learning approaches, which is not yet widely noted in the field of millimeter-wave image analysis.