It is difficult to detect small targets on the sea surface due to large amount of calculation and low detection efficiency of the traditional W-H algorithm.To solve the problem, a new small target detection algorithm based on time-frequency ridge of rearranged spectrum is proposed.This paper studies the characteristics of energy distribution of the time-frequency spectrum of the measured data, compares the analysis results of multiple groups of measured data of the traditional algorithm with that of the new algorithm under different polarization conditions, and studies the characteristics of spikes in Hough parameter domain.The algorithm can effectively detect small targets, which verifies the feasibility of the algorithm.Finally, it is concluded that, by selecting the rearrangement algorithm and extracting the ridge of the rearranged time-frequency spectrum, the new algorithm improves the detection ability, reduces the computation amount, and effectively detects small targets on the sea surface with better performance under the condition of HH polarization.