Remote sensing technology is an important means of ocean exploration. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing is widely used in small observation areas because of its flexible operation, timely data transmission, and high spatial resolution. According to these characteristics, we propose a ship attribute inversion algorithm based on the wake characteristics. First, a band selection method is used to reduce the data dimensionality and remove redundant information from UAV remote sensing data. Then, the ship wake is detected by extracting the shear wave (S-wave) characteristics. Finally, the ship’s motion parameters are inverted according to the S-wave attributes. The experimental results show that the method proposed can detect the wakes effectively and estimate ship velocity accurately using the UAV-obtained hyperspectral images.