Target recognition is of great importance for information extraction from high resolution remote sensing image. As an important kind of man-made objects, ship recognition is a key point to many applications, such as vessel monitoring and marine traffic. As spatial relationship is invariant to topology change, a method of ship recognition from high resolution remote sensing imagery aided by spatial relationship is proposed and implemented. The method includes four critical steps: water segmentation, potential ship detection, seed growing and result creation. Experiments show that this method is robust to object position, orientation, scale, and intensity, and achieve a high accuracy of ship recognition.