The invention discloses a sea-surface ship object detecting and extracting method of an optical remote sensing image, and aims at reducing the false alarm rate effectively, extracting ship objects of different sizes rapidly and accurately, obtaining amount and position information of the objects, and being low in computing complexity. Multi-vision significance is detected on the basis of a frequency-domain model, a hyper complex frequency domain transformation model and a quaternion Fourier transform phase spectral module are fused in a weighted manner to overcome disadvantages of the two models and enhance advantages of the two models, and further sea-surface background interface is inhibited, the integral continuity of detected objects and differentiation performance among the objects are enhanced, and the target area of the sea surface is searched effectively. False alarm against possible heavy cloud layers and islands in the images is reduced, an improved histogram in the gradient direction is used to represent the distribution feature of the gradient structure of the object, the detected objects are discriminated according to established rules and conditions, whether a detected object is a ship is determined, the false alarm rate is reduced greatly, and the detecting accuracy is improved.