Aiming at the problem of detecting ship targets on sea surface from optical satellite remote sensing images,considering the advantages and disadvantages of geostationary orbit remote sensing satellite and low orbit high resolution remote sensing satellite,a method for detecting ship targets on sea surface based on multi-source remote sensing satellites is proposed.Firstly,the target pre-detection of geostationary-satellite remote sensing images is carried out by multi-structure multi-scale morphological filtering and adaptive threshold segmentation method.Secondly,the candidate target area in the high-resolution remote sensing image is settled by combining the pre-detection result and the geographic location information of the satellite image.Finally,the main features of the target in the candidate target area are extracted,and the ship target is discriminated.The discriminated result is reflected to the geostationary orbit remote sensing satellite image.The simulation results show that the proposed method,in the remote sensing image of ocean background,can detect a number of moving ship targets effectively,and it has the advantages of high target detection rate,low false alarm rate and high timeliness.In addition,this method also provides technical support for the geostationary orbit remote sensing satellite to monitor and track the moving ship targets in real-time.