The invention discloses a receiving method of a ship automatic identification system, a receiver and a communication satellite. The receiving method comprises the following steps: receiving an AIS radio frequency signal, filtering and amplifying, carrying out analog-to-digital conversion, carrying out multi-stage orthogonal down-conversion and decimation filtering, storing, carrying out constant false alarm rate inspection, carrying out carrier synchronization, carrying out matched filtering, carrying out code element synchronization, carrying out whitening filtering, and carrying out demodulation decoding. The receiver comprises a radio frequency front-end processing module and a baseband signal processing module. wherein the radio frequency front-end processing module is used for performing intermediate frequency filtering and power amplification, radio frequency sampling, orthogonal down-conversion and decimation filtering processing on a received radio frequency signal to obtain abaseband signal, and the baseband signal processing module is used for performing detection, synchronization and demodulation decoding on an AIS message in the AIS baseband signal. The method has thetechnical characteristics of excellent demodulation performance, resource saving and collision signal processing.