Earth observation systems can quickly detect objects in a large area, which offers great convenience for ship detection and monitoring by the coastal countries in the world. Towards the automated ship detection in remote sensing images, a method that made use of the salient contrast between ship and sea was proposed. Thus, the ship detection and segmentation problem was converted to a salient object discovery and location problem. Inspired by the biological process of visual pathway from the retina to the primary visual cortex V1, the visual signal generating mechanism was simulated to acquire the saliency map of the scene. The experimental results, obtained from using optical images, show that the contrast based method can effectively concentrate on the ships in the sea without any prior knowledge. It is noteworthy that the proposed method achieves good results.