At this stage, ship detection and recognition technology is an important development direction in the field of remote sensing image research. With the rapid development of domestic high-resolution satellites, high-resolution remote sensing satellites have been launched one after another, and ship detection and recognition technology based on optical remote sensing images will gradually become a research hotspot. This article introduces the development of ship detection and recognition technology based on optical images in recent years, and the problems of current technology. The current deep learning-based ship target detection technology has achieved good detection results and has become the mainstream research direction. However, in the field of optical remote sensing image ship detection, deep learning-based methods have some basic problems which limit the detection effect. This article summarizes some of the problems that currently limit the deep learning-based optical remote sensing image ship detection technology, and looks forward to the future development of optical remote sensing image ship detection technology.