In this paper the object recognition performance of a photon counting integral imaging system is quantitatively compared with that of a conventional gray scale imaging system. For 3D imaging of objects with a small number of photons, the elemental image set of a 3D scene is obtained using the integral imaging set up. We assume that the elemental image detection follows a Poisson distribution. Computational geometrical ray back propagation algorithm and parametric maximum likelihood estimator are applied to the photon counting elemental image set in order to reconstruct the original 3D scene. To evaluate the photon counting object recognition performance, the normalized correlation peaks between the reconstructed 3D scenes are calculated for the varied and fixed total number of photons in the reconstructed sectional image changing the total number of image channels in the integral imaging system. It is quantitatively illustrated that the recognition performance of the photon counting integral imaging system can be similar to that of a conventional gray scale imaging system as the number of image viewing channels in the photon counting integral imaging (PCII) system is increased up to the threshold point. Also, we present experiments to find the threshold point on the total number of image channels in the PCII system which can guarantee a comparable recognition performance with a gray scale imaging system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on comparisons of object recognition performance with 3D photon counting & gray scale images.