In order to further improve the brightness and contrast of the infrared image while maintaining the natural effect of the image, an infrared image enhancement method based on adaptive Gamma correction is proposed. The improved bilateral filter is used as the central surround function of Retinex to extract the low-frequency and high-frequency parts of the infrared image, that is, the base layer and the detail layer. Gamma correction adaptive to the proportion of pixels in the dark area is performed on the base layer image, so as to improve the brightness and definition of the image, and adaptive piecewise linear stretching is applied to the detail layer image to further improve the contrast of the image. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of this method, compared with the existing methods, the visual effect of this method is clearer, and the detail information is richer.