A new small target detection method based on energy accumulation and morphology top-hat operator is presented for solving detection of moving small target with low SNR in infrared image sequence. Accumulating the energy of the image sequence in the sliding window with a setting size can remove the random noise in the images in order to increase the SNR

the principle of accumulating the energy of the image sequence is given. Morphology Top-Hat operator can detect peaks and valleys in images

it can be used to detect candidate small targets. According to motion continuity and motion trajectory consistency in multi-frame successive image

the true small targets can be filtrated from candidate small targets. The algorithm of small target detection based on morphology Top-Hat is given. By means of experiments the performances of noise proof and background suppression and false target suppression are compared between our detection method and high-pass filtering detection method. The experiment results show that the method is better than the high pass filtering method in the performances of target detection and it can effectively and reliably detect the moving point target with low SNR.