The methods based on random signal model are usually used to suppress sea clutter and detect target by photoelectric imaging system

but their performance of target detection is generally unstable.The correlative dimension and the largest Lyapunov exponent are extracted from the real sea clutter photoelectric image sequence on the basis of analysis on phase space reconstruction of chaotic dynamical system

and these two parameters are used to test whether the sea clutter has chaotic characteristic or not.The experimental result shows that sea clutter in photoelectric image sequence has a finite correlative dimension and a positive largest Lyapunov exponent

and these two parameters verify that the sea clutter photoelectric image sequence has chaotic characteristic

which indicates that the sea clutter can be suppressed by the short-term prediction and a novel strategy is provided for dim target detection in sea clutter by photoelectric imaging system.