Abstract: Ship detection in harbor region is an important aspect in SAR ocean application research. Fast and accurate ship detection can improve the ability of automatic SAR images interpretation greatly. By analyzing of the characteristics of ship berthing in harbor, a new method is proposed for ship detection in harbor region of SAR images. Firstly, the SAR image of the harbor coastwise region is acquired based on the harbor coastline. Then, a detailed analysis is presented on the clutter statistical properties of harbor coastwise region in SAR image. Further, the ship detection is completed based on the Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector with the G0 distribution. The experimental results demonstrate that the novel method can separate the ships in harbor with various shapes from the land effectively, and is characterized by the high detection rate and the low false alarm rate.