Abstract: In this paper, sea clutter and radar echoes from ship targets are analyzed with the concept of multifractal, and their multifractal dimensions are extracted for detection of ship targets. Experiments show that the multifractal dimensions have good distinctive ability and stability. During detection, the gathered signals fall into two types: sea clutter and ship targets. Taking the multifractal dimensions as a feature vector, the similarity relations are computed and the judgement is made. Results show that the method is reliable and practical.