Abstract: To dates, most ship detection approaches for single-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery try to ensure a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR). A high performance ship detector relies on two key components:an accurate estimation to a sea surface distribution and a fine designed CFAR algorithm. First, a novel nonparametric sea surface distribution estimation method is developed based on n-order Bézier curve. To estimate the sea surface distribution using n-order Bézier curve, an explicit analytical solution is derived based on a least square optimization, and the optimal selection also is presented to two essential parameters, the order n of Bézier curve and the number m of sample points. Next, to validate the ship detection performance of the estimated sea surface distribution, the estimated sea surface distribution by n-order Bézier curve is combined with a cell averaging CFAR (CA-CFAR). To eliminate the possible interfering ship targets in background window, an improved automatic censoring method is applied. Comprehensive experiments prove that in terms of sea surface estimation performance, the proposed method is as good as a traditional nonparametric Parzen window kernel method, and in most cases, outperforms two widely used parametric methods, K and G⁰ models. In terms of computation speed, a major advantage of the proposed estimation method is the time consuming only depended on the number m of sample points while independent of imagery size, which makes it can achieve a significant speed improvement to the Parzen window kernel method, and in some cases, it is even faster than two parametric methods. In terms of ship detection performance, the experiments show that the ship detector which constructed by the proposed sea surface distribution model and the given CA-CFAR algorithm has wide adaptability to different SAR sensors, resolutions and sea surface homogeneities and obtains a leading performance on the test dataset.