Abstract: Based on the target large angle domain High Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) information of the ship formation obtained by the terminal guidance radar during its search phase, this study establishes an ergodic Spatial Hidden Markov Model (SHMM) which describes statistical relationship between the vectors in a single HRRP sample and a left to right Temporal HMM (THMM) which describes statistical relationship between HRRP samples. In comparison with the method that it only establishes a THMM model with the training data of all-round angle of one target, the proposed method makes full use of the target HRRP information of large angle domain and can improve the recognition performance. Through the simulation of the five types of ship target and the field measured data analysis of three kinds of civilian vessels show that the effectiveness of the proposed method.