Abstract: Ship detection and recognition is one of the most active research topics in the field of remote sensing. This strong interest is driven by a wide spectrum of promising applications in many areas such as ocean traffic surveillance, ship rescuing, fisheries management, maritime situational awareness (MSA), etc. The aim of ship detection and recognition is to extract, identify and locate ship targets in remotely sensed images. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of recent developments on ship detection and recognition in optical remotely sensed imagery. The influencing factors are analyzed, and the state of the art methods are reviewed. Furthermore, the remaining problems and future development trends are provided for detecting and recognizing ship targets in optical remotely sensed images.