In recent years, the defect image classification method based on deep transfer learning has been widely explored and researched, and the task of source and target domains with the same painting defect image class has been solved successfully. However, in real applications, due to the complexity and uncertainty of ship painting conditions, it is very likely that there are unknown classes of painting defects, and the traditional deep learning model cannot identify a few classes, which leads to model overfitting and reduces its generalization ability. In this paper, a zero-shot Image classification method for ship painting defects based on IDATLWGAN is proposed to identify new unknown classes of defects in the target domain. The method is based on a deep convolutional neural network combined with adversarial transfer learning. First, a preprocessed ship painting defect dataset is used as input for the domain-invariant feature extractor. Then, the domain invariant feature extractor takes domain invariant features from the source and target domains. Finally, Defect discriminators and domain alignment discriminators are employed to classify the known categories of unlabeled defects and unknown categories of unlabeled defects in the target domain and to further reduce the distance between the edge distributions of the source and target domains. The experimental results show that the proposed model in this paper extracts a better distribution of invariant features in the source and target domains compared to other existing transfer learning models. It can successfully complete the migration task and accurately recognize the painting defects of known categories and new unknown categories, which is a perfect combination of intelligent algorithms and engineering practice.