In order to realize the representation of perceptual information of terrain space environment for UCAV cognitive navigation, a method is proposed to construct place cells based on IHDR tree. SURF algorithm is used to extract high robustness feature points in environment, the landmarks' information are combined by the description vector of feature point and its position in geographic space, so the training samples are obtained, and the double clustering of landmarks' information is achieved according to the IHDR algorithm, and the leaf nodes of clustering are regarded as place cells to represent the terrain space environment. Finally, the place cells are constructed .The simulation results show that the place cells constructed by this method can represent the terrain space environment effectively, and have the ability of recognizing terrain space environment under condition of certain noise interference.