Abstract: In this paper,a new method was proposed to detect inshore ships in high-resolution optical remote sensing images.Firstly,suspected ship head targets,been transformed into the polar coordinate system,were classified with support vector machine(SVM)to obtain head positions and directions of candidate ships.Secondly,the ship direction was refined by utilizing the line segments information around the ship.At last,the ship body was detected using grayscale and edge information in order to finally confirm this ship target.Experiment results show that the proposed method can accurately and robustly detect inshore ships.