The invention relates to an SAR single-scene image brightness compensating method based on local histogram compression. The method comprises the following steps of S1, for a to-be-processed SAR single-scene image, selecting an area with non-uniform brightness as a selected area; S2, performing traversal on the selected area, obtaining a lowest pixel gray scale value and a highest pixel gray scalevalue in the selected area; S3, drawing the histogram of the selected area, and selecting compression probability p of the histogram, obtaining the highest gray scale value x after compression of theselected area, wherein the gray scale range of the selected area is divided into two parts of [A,x] and [x+1,B]; S4, obtaining an appropriate compression factor mf through an iteration method so thatthe gray scale of the selected area is compressed from an initial range [A,B] to [A,x]; and S5, performing traversal on the selected area, for the gray scale value Ik of a random pixel, if Ik belongsto [A,x], outputting the Ik; and otherwise, outputting Ik / mf, thereby obtaining the image after brightness compensation. The SAR single-scene image brightness compensating method has advantages of effectively preventing black point phenomenon, reserving detail information of the image, and obtaining a satisfactory brightness compensation effect.