An improved Itti′s model is applied on the ship targets detection of ocean surveillance satellite images. We illustrate the algorithm process of Itti′s model, and introduce a capacitor array charging model to describe the extracting and transferring process of the focus of attention. To solve the problems existing in the traditional Itti′s model such as the fixed shape and size of the extracted salient region, the poor real-time detecting performance when the radius of salient region goes too small, and excessive background areas contained in the salient region when the radius is set too large, the algorithm is improved in some aspects in this paper. Firstly, the discrete moment transform is introduced to the algorithm to enhance the response of image texture features. Then, the threshold segmentation method is chosen to extract the salient region with the focus of attention, and thus both the detection accuracy and real-time performance are improved greatly. According to the Matlab test results of the improved algorithm, it is verified that both the shape and size of the salient region are consistent well with the ship targets; the background contained in the salient region is also reduced significantly. Moreover, the improved algorithm has a good real-time performance. It comes to the conclusion that compared with Itti′s model, the improved algorithm is more effective and suitable for the extraction of ship targets detection of ocean satellite images.