To systematically summarize the research progress of attention mechanisms and radar image intelligent processing, this paper reviewed the development context of attention mechanisms and elaborateed on typical models, represented by channel attention, spatial attention, self-attention, and hybrid attention. On this basis, the innovative applications of various attention mechanisms in radar image intelligent processing were discussed from the perspectives of tasks such as radar image preprocessing, target detection, image segmentation, and target recognition. To verify the application performance of attention mechanisms, a comparative analysis of different attention mechanisms was conducted based on radar image target detection. Future research directions were discussed from four aspects: attention mechanism interpretability, efficient attention mechanism design, attention mechanism optimization for multimodal fusion, and attention mechanism design in foundation models.