Abstract The material attributes of foreign object debris (FOD) are the most crucial factors to understand the level of damage sustained by an aircraft. However, the prevalent FOD detection systems lack an effective method for automatic material recognition. This paper proposes a novel FOD material recognition approach based on both transfer learning and a mainstream deep convolutional neural network (D-CNN) model. To this end, we create an FOD image dataset consisting of images from the runways of Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport and the campus of our research institute. We optimize the architecture of the D-CNN by considering the characteristics of the material distribution of the FOD. The results show that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of material recognition by 39.6% over the state-of-the-art method. The work here will help enhance the intelligence capability of future FOD detection systems and encourage other practical applications of material recognition technology.