The excellent feature extraction ability of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) has been demonstrated in many image processing tasks, by which image classification can achieve high accuracy with only raw input images. However, the specific image features that influence the classification results are not readily determinable and what lies behind the predictions is unclear. This study proposes a method combining the Sobel and Canny operators and an Inception module for ship classification. The Sobel and Canny operators obtain enhanced edge features from the input images. A convolutional layer is replaced with the Inception module, which can automatically select the proper convolution kernel for ship objects in different image regions. The principle is that the high-level features abstracted by the DCNN, and the features obtained by multi-convolution concatenation of the Inception module must ultimately derive from the edge information of the preprocessing input images. This indicates that the classification results are based on the input edge features, which indirectly interpret the classification results to some extent. Experimental results show that the combination of the edge features and the Inception module improves DCNN ship classification performance. The original model with the raw dataset has an average accuracy of 88.72%, while when using enhanced edge features as input, it achieves the best performance of 90.54% among all models. The model that replaces the fifth convolutional layer with the Inception module has the best performance of 89.50%. It performs close to VGG-16 on the raw dataset and is significantly better than other deep neural networks. The results validate the functionality and feasibility of the idea posited.