Automatic detection and recognition of electro-optical targets is a key technology in the intelligent missile terminal guidance.Fractal theory provides a new technical way.Because the difference of fractal dimension and fractal fitting error between artificial target and natural background is obvious,this paper proposes an electro-optical target detection method based on fractal dimension and fractal fitting error.Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect targets stable,is superior to the edge detection method,the threshold segment method and the single fractal dimension method,and is a promising detection method of the electro-optical target.