This paper introduces elliptic Gabor wavelets with the triangular lattice configuration as a model-based target recognition approach. And, making the degree of overlap uniform between the neighboring Gabor wavelets in the frequency domain, it enables to cover the frequency space with higher density than the existing circular Gabor wavelets with square lattice configuration. Thus, it succeeds efficiently to extract a rotation and scale invariant features of the target objects. This paper, furthermore, presents some useful guidelines for designing system parameter values by a large amount of experiments, and shows effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with other methods.