It is difficult to detect and recognize dim and small infrared targets in the complicated sea-sky background. To solve this problem, a remote small target recognition method based on sea-sky line detection is proposed. In the method, the correlation processing is performed on the infrared images collected. To improve the signal-to-clutter ratio of the target, the background clutter noise is suppressed through multi-level wavelet transform. Then, a multi-direction Gabor filtering fusion method is used to enhance the edge of the sea-sky line and the sea-sky line is positioned and detected through Hough transform. Finally, by positioning the sea-sky-line, the target search area near the sea-sky line is determined, the potential area of the target is narrowed and hence the detection and recognition probability of the dim and small target in the background of sea and sky is improved.