Considering the moving target detection in reverberation background, the high-order statistics obtained by the output of received data after beamforming and matched filtering were regarded as statistical observation space. Based on the high-order statistical characteristic difference of reverberation and target echoes, the high-order statistics can be used to build characteristic vectors by multiple ping output. The Mahalanobis distance between characteristic vectors of the target and reverberation was used as the quantified standard to measure difference between the target and reverberation. The threshold was based on the maximal constant conditional power test. ROC(receiver operating characteristic) curves were obtained under different signal-reverberation ratio conditions by Monte Carlo simulations. Simulations and sea trial results show that the new method achieves higher performance than traditional detection using single ping.The output signal-reverberation ratio, which ensures the false alarm lower than 0.01 and the detection probability higher than 0.5, is reduced to 3 dB, approximately 6 dB less than that of the traditional method.