Abstract: An infrared target detection algorithm based on region growing was presented to solve the problems of low contrast, complex background, and unconductive to objective testing. First, on the basis of morphological filtering mechanism, and using overall distribution of the texture image for progressive scanning, effectively selecting maxima minimum point, the size of the structural elements was determined adaptively for the image filtering. Second, based on the automatic extraction of the seed region, growth threshold was sentenced by dynamically adjusting the growth conditions, determining the target to be detected. Experimental results show that the proposed method compared with the NCC methods and OTSU method has the advantages of 10% for detecting accuracy rate and higher precision.