The acoustic signal radiated by the helicopter has a slow attenuation speed and a long propagation distance in the air, which is the main basis for recognition of helicopter target. Inspired by the excellent sound signal recognition ability of the human auditory system, an auditory perceptual feature extraction method based on Gammatone cepstral coefficients（GTCC） is proposed to classify helicopter acoustic signal. Through the simulation experiments，the influence of parameter settings on the recognition performance, the robustness of the proposed method in noisy environments, the universal applicability to various classifiers, and the superiority to other helicopter acoustic signal feature extraction methods were studied in detail. Reasonable explanations of the observed experimental results were also given in this paper. The results show that the proposed method can effectively identify the type of helicopter according to the acoustic signal, and has good anti-interference ability to noise, which has certain application prospects. It is also shown that different parameter settings have different effects on the recognition performance, where the length of window function, the number of Gammatone cepstral coefficient features and the low-frequency acoustic signal have a great influence on the recognition accuracy, while high-frequency acoustic signal has little influence on the recognition.