Harbours are very important objects in civil and military fields. To detect them from high resolution remote sensing imagery is important in various fields and also a challenging task. Traditional methods of detecting harbours mainly focus on the segmentation of water and land and the manual selection of knowledge. They do not make enough use of other features of remote sensing imagery and often fail to describe the harbours completely. In order to improve the detection, a new method is proposed. First, the image is transformed to Hue, Saturation, Value (HSV) colour space and saliency analysis is processed via the generation and enhancement of the co-occurrence histogram to help detect and locate the regions of interest (ROIs) that is salient and may be parts of the harbour. Next, SIFT features are extracted and feature learning is processed to help represent the ROIs. Then, by using classified feature of the harbour, a classifier is trained and used to check the ROIs to find whether they belong to the harbour. Finally, if the ROIs belong to the harbour, a minimum bounding rectangle is formed to include all the harbour ROIs and detect and locate the harbour. The experiment on high resolution remote sensing imagery shows that the proposed method performs better than other methods in precision of classifying ROIs and accuracy of completely detecting and locating harbours.