Abstract: For the dim optical object difficult to fast and accurate detection, a novel algorithm based on the row and column maximum projection of image sequences into the 2D frequency domain was proposed. Firstly, in order to reduce the computation complexity and separate the moving object from the background, through projecting into the 2D frequency domain and removing the zero frequency components, the input video with global background motion compensation was transformed into image sequences comprising of dim small moving object and noise. Secondly, after the row and column maximum projection, the higher signal-to-noise ratio image sequences with dim moving target was obtained. Thirdly, through the principal motion filtering and image reconstruction, the dim moving object was detected. Finally, the proposed algorithm was applied to the dim moving object detection in the strong background noise. The simulation experiment results show the proposed algorithm can not only effectively detect the dim moving object but also have good signal-to-noise ratio of detection.