Abstract: Owing to the increasing maritime transport volume and complexity of waterway,ship intelligent collision avoidance has attracted great attention in the field of maritime traffic safety.This review summarizes four important intel-ligent collision avoidance systems based on expert systems,fuzzy control,neural networks and artificial potential field, and discusses the key techniques,including collision avoidance model and collision avoidance information,to be chal-lenged.Then collision avoidance model with dynamics description and the classification of collision avoidance information based on the weights are elucidated.Finally,the prospects for ship intelligent collision avoidance system are considered, including the stereoscopic ship and online risk identification through collision model.