In this paper, we propose a robust background removal integral projection(BRIP) method which can detect close surface targets in coastal environment for IRST. Row pixels of background region from coastal infrared image show similar response. Thus, the proposed BRIP is calculated after horizontal and vertical background estimations and removals are performed sequentially. Finally, surface large targets can be detected using the results of the BRIP. Experimental results on a set of real infrared image sequence show that the proposed method could fully detect ships in every frame.