With the aim to solve the problem of missing or tampering of ship type information in AIS information, in this paper, a novel ship type recognition scheme based on ship navigating trajectory and convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. Firstly, according to speed and acceleration of the ship, three ship navigating situations, i.e., static, normal navigation and maneuvering, are integrated into the process of trajectory images generation in the form of pixels. Then, three kinds of modular network structures with different depths are trained and optimized to determine the appropriate convolutional neural network structure. In the validation phase of the model, a large amount of verified data with a time span of one month was used, covering a variety of water conditions including open water, ports, rivers and lakes. Following this approach, a kind of CNN scheme which can be directly used to identify ship types in a wide range of waters is proposed. This scheme can be used to judge the ship type when the static information is completely missing and to test the data when the ship type information is partially missing.