Of late, Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD)-based time-frequency representation has been shown to become a viable tool in the study of time-varying signals. In this paper, we discuss the implementation details of a WVD-based moving target detector (MTD) on a TMS320C30 floating-point digital signal processor. In this approach, WVD has been employed as a functional block instead of the conventional fast Fourier transform (FFT) processor [1]. A comparison of the implementation and the computational details of MTD based on FFT and WVD has been included. Finally the probability of detection (Pd) and the probability of false alarm (Pfa) curves, in the presence of log-normal clutter, have been presented to support the superiority of the proposed MTD-WVD over MTD-I. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.