A new small target detection method for infrared image based on energy accumulation and mean shift clustering is presented. Firstly

accumulating the energy of the infrared image sequence in the sliding window with fixed size can remove the random noise in the infrared images to increase the SNR (signal to noise ratio). Secondly

we suppress the background by using the difference of adaptive mean shift filtering results with two different bandwidths. And thirdly

we segmenting the regions where there are possible targets and extract the statistical features. Finally filter the true targets according to the principle of moving continuity and trajectory consistency of moving target in the image sequences. Target image and background image can be obtained by use of differernt mean shift clustering

the noise can be excluded at the same time. The experimental results indicate that the method can effectively detect the small and weak targets under complex backgrounds.