Hyperspectral images (HSIs) possess non-negative properties for both hyperspectral signatures and abundance coefficients, which can be naturally modeled using cone-based representation. However, in hyperspectral target detection, cone-based methods are barely studied. In this paper, we propose a new regularized cone-based representation approach to hyperspectral target detection, as well as its two working models by incorporating into the cone representation l-norm and l-norm regularizations, respectively. We call the new approach the matched shrunken cone detector (MSCD). Also important, we provide principled derivations of the proposed MSCD from the Bayesian perspective: we show that MSCD can be derived by assuming a multivariate half-Gaussian distribution or a multivariate half-Laplace distribution as the prior distribution of the coefficients of the models. In the experimental studies, we compare the proposed MSCD with the subspace methods and the sparse representation-based methods for HSI target detection. Two real hyperspectral data sets are used for evaluating the detection performances on sub-pixel targets and full-pixel targets, respectively. Results show that the proposed MSCD can outperform other methods in both cases, demonstrating the competitiveness of the regularized cone-based representation.