Future warfare will develop towards the integration of sea， land， air and space， and the development of massive data informatization. As an important target of marine information perception， the development of ship detection technology is of great significance to infrared security defense systems. Based on the characteristics of infrared payload imaging the basic framework of infrared target detection is proposed in this paper. And the research status of the three key steps of image preprocessing， rough target inspection and target identification is introduced in details. On this basis， various algorithms are compared and their applicability， advantages and disadvantages are pointed out. Finally， the future development trend of infrared target detection is prospected.