Weak target detection is a key problem in passive bistatic radar (PBR). Track-before-detect (TBD) is an effective solution which has drawn much attention recently. However, TBD has not been fully developed in PBR. In this paper, the transition function and the selection of parameters in dynamic programming are analyzed in PBR. Then a novel processing scheme of dynamic programming based TBD is proposed to reduce the computation complexity without severely decreasing the detection performance. Discussions including complexity, detection performance, threshold determination, selection of parameters and detection of multitarget, are presented in detail. The new method can provide fast implementation with only a slight performance penalty. In addition, good multitarget detection performance can be achieved by using this method. Simulations are carried out to present the performance of the proposed processing scheme.