Abstract: It is of great significance to obtain the identity information of the passing ships on the canal.To locate ship license plates quickly and accurately is the primary task to realize automatic identification of ships.In order to improve the performance on detecting small-scale ship license plates,this paper proposes a two-stage algorithm for locating ship license plates based on deep feature transfer and fusion.First,in the stage of detecting ships,a ship detection model is constructed through transfer learning to gain the position information of the ships in the image.Then in the stage of locating ship license plates,a multi-scale locating network with feature fusion strategy is proposed to locate the target plate area based on the previous stage.Experimental results on SLPLOC dataset show that the proposed method can reduce the errors and improve the precision and recall effectively.