A novel unsupervised ship detection and extraction method is proposed. A combination model based on visual saliency is constructed for searching the ship target regions and suppressing the false alarms. The salient target regions are extracted and marked through segmentation. Radon transform is applied to confirm the suspected ship targets with symmetry profiles. Then, a new descriptor, improved histogram of oriented gradient (HOG), is introduced to discriminate the real ships. The experimental results on real optical remote sensing images demonstrate that plenty of ships can be extracted and located successfully, and the number of ships can be accurately acquired. Furthermore, the proposed method is superior to the contrastive methods in terms of both accuracy rate and false alarm rate.