The invention discloses a ship target detection and identification method for a satellite-borne remote sensing optical image. The method comprises the following steps of preprocessing, ineffective information removal, connected region marking, feature extraction and classifier design. A coarse-to-fine strategy is adopted, firstly, a satellite image is subjected to downsampling and Gaussian filtering processing, then, land and isolated noisy points are removed from the processed image, a candidate region is quickly extracted and is marked, feature information is extracted after the image is rotated, then, the feature information is put into a pre-trained classifier to be furthered confirmed and analyzed, false alarms are removed, and a real ship target is found. Meanwhile, the invention also realizes a ship target detection and identification system for the satellite-bone remote sensing optical image. By use of the technical scheme, satellite-borne storage and calculation of limited resources can be effectively utilized to improve the stability and the real time of a ship detection algorithm, meanwhile, a false alarm rate is effectively lowered, and accurate data can be provided for maritime search and rescue and ship image positioning in time.