Abstract: Ships have an extremely important position in the military field. Their wakes will cause relatively obvious changes in the temperature and height of the sea surface, and have the characteristics of long duration and difficult to eliminate. Therefore, the simulation of ship wakes and infrared radiation image of the sea surface can identify the ship targets more intuitively, which has a strong military demand. Based on the data of atmospheric transmittance to 8 μm～14 μm band in different background environments simulated by MODTRAN software, a ship wake infrared radiation model was established by combining Cox-Munk slope probability distribution model and considering wave occlusion factors to simulate infrared wake images with different background environments and different detection distances. The simulation results show that under the same detection conditions, although the radiation brightness of the ship wakes decreases with the increase of the detection distance, the ship wakes on the sea surface are more easily identified since the shielding effect of the rough sea surface on the infrared radiation is considerably diminished. The atmospheric transmission model has a great influence on the infrared imaging results. In summer, the background radiation energy is substantial and the average occlusion effect of sea surface is modest, so the infrared imaging of ship wakes is clearer.