Abstract Some probles about SAR moving targets imaging by joint time-frequency analysis are discussed in this paper.Three kinds of time-frequency transforms--Short Time Fourior Transform(STFT),Wavelet Transform(WT) and Wigner-Ville Distribution (WVD) are compared.It is presented that only WVD could meet the requirement.Moveover,Hough Transform(HT) is employed in restraining the distribing corss terms,rpoduced by the WVD due to its bilinear property.Experiments test that the combined WVD and HT could provide satisfactory detection performance even if the signal-to-noise rato is very low.