In recent years, the practical use range of satellite images has spread focusing on the civil engineering and urban planning field. We expect that the satellite images will be utilized also for a maritime field in the near future. For example, it is expected that satellite images are utilized for analysis of marine traffic capacity or density or investigation of the maritime accidents. Therefore, we should know features of each ship image to find and distinguish specified ships from others. For this purpose, we distinguish various ships from the high-resolution images of the IKONOS satellite, and examine the appearances of the ships in the satellite images. High-resolution images of the vessel in a satellite photograph are classified for several kinds of ship and some examples of ship image feature are shown in this paper.
