The invention relates to an automatic detection method for an airport of a large-size space-borne SAR image, which comprises the following steps of: A, performing SAR image segmentation based on a maximum posterior probability criterion; B, extracting interesting targets according to the pixel intensity and the area of the airport; C, extracting dimensions and rotary invariable parameters of the interesting targets; D, training a support vector machine classifier according to the dimensions and the rotary invariable parameters of the interesting targets, and classifying the interesting targets to obtain an initial detection result; and E, performing parallel runway detection on the initial detection result, and retaining the targets with parallel runways as final detection results. Compared with the prior art, the method has the advantages of high identification speed, good identification quality and high identification accuracy rate.