The traditional detection method of moving target only considers one characteristic of the image ,such as brightness or texture ,which is greatly affected by outliers ,sensitive to noise ,poor robustness ,and low precision of background recovery. In view of the above limitations ,a moving target detection method based on structural similarity ( SSIM) full reference model and robust principal component analysis ( RPCA) is proposed. In this method ,the bright- ness ,contrast and structure of the image are considered comprehensively. Instead of using the traditional background subtraction method ,the structure similarity of image pixels is taken as the metric to separate the moving objects from the background. The experimental results show that the accuracy of this method can reach 0. 95 ,and the F-measure are 0. 15 higher than the traditional moving target detection algorithm on average ,which is more advantageous than the traditional method on the whole.