Abstract: The image processing technologies for recognizing ship targets from the data produced by high resolution remote sensing satellites are presented.Image enhancement, cutting and slicing are performed first.The sliced image is segmented by means of local threshold segmentation.Several segmentation algorithms are investigated, including Otsu method, the maximum entropy method and GA-based maximum entropy method.Ship targets are finally recognized from segment synthesized image through extracting the contour feature.The advantage of GA-based maximum entropy method in speed and effectiveness is demonstrated by experiments.