Abstract: Aiming at the problem of stray light interference in ground-based visible light observation images, a stray light noise removal method of star maps based on intensity prior was proposed. First, by analyzing the causes of stray light and its spatial distribution characteristics in star maps, a degradation model of the star maps under stray light interference was established; then, the intensity prior of star maps was used to estimate the depth information of the atmosphere and remove the unevenly distributed stray light noise; finally, the method was verified on the actual star maps taken by the ground-based optical telescopes. Compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed method obtained better experimental results in terms of background suppression and target signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) improvement for targets interfered by different degrees of stray light. Among them, for the space target with a SCR of 2.05 or more in the sequence star maps, the proposed method can obtain the SCR gain of 7.39 or more and the background suppression factor (BSF) of 1.92 or more after processing.