In target recognition, the use of Dempsters rule for conflict evidence fusion may result in unreasonable conclusion. To solve the problem, we proposed a weighted Mahalanobis distance based method for improving the evidence theory. Before the application of evidence theory, the evidences were preprocessed and the support degree of each evidence was calculated out by introducing weighted Mahalanobis distance. The conflict evidence was superseded by average evidence and the weight of evidence was obtained by support degree. Then the evidences were fused by evidence theory combination rule to recognize the target. In simulations, the proposed method was compared with the existing combination methods, and the result shows that this method is more effective in combining conflict evidence than the others.