In this paper, firstly, target candidate regions are extracted by combining maximum symmetric surround saliency detection algorithm with a cellular automata dynamic evolution model. Secondly, an eigenvector independent of the ship target size is constructed by combining the shape feature with ship histogram of oriented gradient (S-HOG) feature, and the target can be recognized by AdaBoost classifier. As demonstrated in our experiments, the proposed method with the detection accuracy of over 96% outperforms the state-of-the-art method.1 efficiency switch and modulation.