Abstract: In order to effectively maintain and restore the edges and details of infrared images while removing the impulse noise, an iterative bilateral median filter based on intensity features and mode principle is proposed. In this method, based on the intensity features of impulse noise and the mode principle, the pixels that take the minimum and maximum values and are isolated on the intensity distribution of the neighborhood are recognized as noisy pixels. According to the weighted coefficients with respect to the spatial distance and intensity similarity, the noiseless pixels in the neighborhood and the pixels that have been denoised and restored are weighted by the frequencies, and the frequency weighted median is used as the estimated value of noisy pixels. Furthermore, the denoising processing is performed in the way of iterative traversal processing, which makes the most of the results of the previous traversal processing to remove high density noise. The experimental data confirm that the PSNR and EPI values and the visual effects achieved by the proposed method are better than the existing methods, with better denoising performance.