The huge computing and storage requirements of deep con-volutional neural networks (DCNNs) limit their application on edge computing devices. In this article, we propose an attention mechanism based on the feature map quality evaluation algorithm (IQE). The knowledge distillation method based on the IQE attention mechanism uses the IQE method to identify important knowledge in the pre-trained SAR target recognition deep neural network. Then in the process of knowledge distillation, the lightweight network is forced to focus on the learning of important knowledge. Through this mechanism, the method proposed in this paper can efficiently transfer the knowledge of the pre-trained SAR target recognition network to the lightweight network, which makes it is possible to deploy the SAR target recognition algorithm on the edge computing platform. Comparison experiments with several commonly used knowledge distillation methods have proved the effectiveness of our proposed method. In addition, we also verified the performance of the lightweight network obtained by our method on the edge platform based on the K210 processor.