Evident sidelobe on faint ship target seriously affects the accuracy of the target segmentation in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images.To avoid this problem,a novel sidelobe control method based on NonSubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) for ship targets in SAR images is presented in this paper.This method enhances the SAR images in NSCT domain based on target azimuth estimation and then inhibits the sidelobe directionally in NSCT high-pass frequency subbands.Experimental results on RADARSAT-2 images demonstrate that the proposed method can not only reduce the strong sidelobes effectively,but also enhance the intensity of the objects successfully.Therefore,it gives a good segmentation result on the dark ship images with strong sidelobe,and enhances the detection rate on these targets.