Abstract: It has always been technically difficult to compress the high dynamic range data collected by an infrared detector to low dynamic range image data, while preserving the image information as much as possible and improving the contrast of the image. To solve this problem, a new infrared image compression method was proposed. In this method, histogram information is introduced, and the pixels of the background and target regions are distinguished by the segmentation of the histogram. Then, the compression model is established. Finally, enhancing the contrast of the image pixels using different coefficients combines the segmented histogram. The algorithm proposed in this paper uses histogram information to distinguish the pixels of the background region and the pixels of the target region and can effectively suppress background noise when enhancing the image contrast. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can better highlight details and improve the contrast.