In this paper, we present an analysis of a digital moving target indicator (DMTI) using the traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT) and the recently developed nonlinear spectral estimation techniques.The performance evaluation has been done using simulated target and clutter models in presence of white Gaussian noise. MTI improvement factor has been computed for all the cases which clearly shows the superiority of the non-linear spectral estimation methods, especially for short data lengths. © 1992 IEEE.