The present disclosure provides a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image target detection method. The present disclosure takes the anchor-free target detection algorithm YOLOX as the basic framework, reconstructs the backbone feature extraction network from the lightweight perspective, and replaces the depthwise separable convolution in MobilenetV2 with one ordinary convolution and one depthwise separable convolution. The number of channels in the feature map is reduced by half through the ordinary convolution, features input from the ordinary convolution are further extracted by the depthwise separable convolution, and the convolutional results from the two convolutions are spliced. The present disclosure highlights the unique strong scattering characteristic of the SAR target through the attention enhancement pyramid attention network (CSEMPAN) by integrating channels and spatial attention mechanisms. In view of the multiple scales and strong sparseness of the SAR target, the present disclosure uses an ESPHead.