Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method is an effective method which decomposes the nonnegative matrix into two non-negative factor matrices. New iterative formulas of the two non-negative factor matrices are proposed based on the exponent distribution in this paper. The bases acquired by this method are disordered. But the order is very important for target detection. A new NMF approach combined Mutual Information is proposed

which used for the detection of SAR images. In the algorithm

priori knowledge of targets is used to obtain the favorable feature vector groups

the feature maps about the test image are respectively gained by using the feature vector groups. All the feature the maps are weighted into a general characteristic map. Finally

the targets are extracted in the characteristic of the map by choosing a suitable threshold. Experimental results of ADTS target high-resolution airborne SAR data show that this method is effective and feasible.