In order to separating the boundary information of airplane from the noisy information generated from the texture of the sky background and accomplishing the mission of airplane detection, research the airplane target detection method based on boundary chain code. The features of the airplane are analyzed in terms of man-made rigid body. The small break on the edge is repaired by morphological technique at first. Then carry out primary filtering and processing on edge by filtering short edge, verifying closure and cutting. Extract feature of edge straight line and angle hopping, establish and train classifier based on support vector machine, realize the edge classifying in video sequence. At last, acquire the exact edge of airplane target. The test results show that, based on ensuring sufficient classifier training set, it can effectively acquire accurate edge of airplane target, the target detection correct rate reaches 96%. The proposed method has a great value in engineering practice.