Detecting vehicle targets in non-cooperative areas is of great import ance in both military and civil fields. For the intensive interferences of complex background in satellite images,it is a challenging task to detect vehicle targets automatically from non-cooperative areas using satellite images.In thi s paper,a new vehicle target detection approach is presented,which introduces a modified grayscale morpholog ical reconstruction to reduce the interferences of complex background in non-cooperative areas.Initially,the norm alized difference vegetation indices (NDVIs) are obtained by using the near infrared and the red bands of a satellite image.And the NDVIs are used to remove the vegetation pixels from the satellite image.Next,a marker image is g enerated by filtering the panchromatic image using a group of directional filters that are designed to pre serve man-made objects.And the man-made objects in the satellite image are acquired by a grayscale reconstruct ion from the marker image.Finally,the vehicle targets are detected by using the difference between the original satell ite image and the reconstructed image,which can eliminate the interferences of complex background.The proposed method is applied to real satellite images for vehicle targets detection.The experimental results show th at our proposed approach has high detection rate,good robustness and non-manual assistance.It can be used for detecting vehicle targets automatically in large scale satellite image s.