Ship target classification plays an important role in tasks such as maritime traffic control, maritime target tracking, and military reconnaissance. The complex ocean environment often causes obscuration of the ship targets, thus resulting in low accuracy of the obscured targets. This paper presents a novel target classification algorithm-Improved InceptionV3 and Center Loss CNN (IICL-CNN)-based on the well-established Inception network to improve the accuracy of obscured targets. This algorithm features a new objective function, which is designed to learn common features of both the clear samples and the obscured samples and, in the meantime, reduce the intra-class distance among the obscured samples. Experiments were performed on an optical remote sensing image dataset which consisted of 48,000 ship images in 9 categories. The proposed method demonstrated superior performance on the obscured ship targets compared to the original InceptionV3 model. On average, the accuracy was 4.23%, 5.98%, and 17.48% higher on the ship targets that were occluded by levels of 30%, 50%, and 70%, respectively. Our experimental results showed that the proposed IICL-CNN could effectively improve the accuracy of the ship targets at various occlusion levels. Index Terms-Convolution neural network, deep learning, feature extraction, fog occlusion, image classification, remote sensing image I. INTRODUCTION HIP target classification is an emerging research area which has a broad range of applications in civil and military fields, such as maritime traffic control, onshore search, maritime target tracking, and military reconnaissance. With the developments in computer vision and machine learning, there are many recent studies in this area. Zhu et al. [1] recently proposed a method for ship identification, which extracted multiple highdimensional local features from ship images and then used Support Vector Machine (SVM) for target classification. In order to identify ship targets more accurately, SVM is combined with other methods to improve effectiveness and robustness [2, 3, 4, 5]. Aiming at the sparseness of targets in optical remote sensing images, Li et al. [6] proposed a method for target detection and classification based on morphological