In this paper we present the optical and near-infrared identifications of the 1054 radio sources detected in the 20cm deep radio survey down to a 5 \sigma flux limit of \sim 80 \mu Jy obtained with the VLA in the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey VVDS-02h deep field .
Using U,B,V,R,I and K data , with limiting magnitudes of U _ { AB } \sim 25.4 , B _ { AB } \sim 26.5 , V _ { AB } \sim 26.2 , R _ { AB } \sim 25.9 I _ { AB } \sim 25.0 , J _ { AB } \sim 24.2 , K _ { AB } \sim 23.9 ( 50 % completeness ) we identified 718 radio sources ( \sim 74 % of the whole sample ) .

The photometric redshift analysis shows that , in each magnitude bin , the radio sample has a higher median photometric redshift than the whole optical sample , while the median ( V - I ) _ { AB } color of the radio sources is redder than the median color of the whole optical sample .
These results suggest that radio detection is preferentially selecting galaxies with higher intrinsic optical luminosity .

From the analysis of the optical properties of the radio sources as function of the radio flux , we found that while about 35 % of the radio sources are optically unidentified in the higher radio flux bin ( S > 1.0 mJy ) , the percentage of unidentified sources decreases to about 25 % in the faintest bins ( S < 0.5 mJy ) .
The median I _ { AB } magnitude for the total sample of radio sources , i.e .
including also the unidentified ones , is brighter in the faintest radio bins than in the bin with higher radio flux .
This suggests that most of the faintest radio sources are likely to be associated to relatively lower radio luminosity objects at relatively modest redshift , rather than radio-powerful , AGN type objects at high redshift .
Using a classification in early-type and late-type galaxies based on the ( B - I ) _ { AB } color and the photometric redshift , we found that the majority of the radio sources below \sim 0.15 mJy are indeed late-type star forming galaxies .
Finally , the radio sources without optical counterpart in our deep imaging have a median radio flux of 0.15 mJy , equal to that of identified sources .
Given the very faint optical limits , these unidentified radio sources probably contain a significant fraction of obscured and/or high redshift galaxies .