It is very difficult to design an effective detector to spot ship targets. In this paper，a new method of detection based on fractal characteristics of sea-surface scattering is proposed. By comparing the difference in the fractal dimension between the sea c1utter and the echoes from a target，an effective detection of the radar ship targets can be realized. In order to test this method，we use the real radar returns of ship targets for detection and a better result has been achieved.