A method of target detection in infrared image sequences is proposed based on the least absolute deviation background predication.Firstly,prediction model of the background signal based on the least absolute deviation criterion was built.Based on characters of the least absolute deviation estimation,the extreme value was extracted by the linear programming.Then,the estimated image was subtracted from the source image to get the residual image.Finally,the fast threshold selection algorithm based on the two-dimensional exponent entropy was used to segment the residual image.The experimental results were given and analyzed.They were compared with those of the method based on least squares estimation.The results show that this approach can precisely detect the small infrared target and the method is better than the method based on least squares estimation.