A method and apparatus for recognizing an object are provided, including extracting a feature from an input image and generating a feature map in a neural network. In parallel with the generating of the feature map, a region of interest (ROI) corresponding to an object of interest is extracted from the input image, and a number of object candidate regions used to detect the object of interest is determined based on a size of the ROI. The object of interest is recognized from the ROI based on the number of object candidate regions in the neural network.