Abstract: Infrared dim and small target detection is an important part of the infrared search and tracking system (IRST). Generally, in a complex background environment, infrared dim and small target detection often has the problem of a high false alarm rate and low detection rate. To solve this problem, an improved weighted enhanced local contrast measurement (IWELCM) detection framework is proposed. First, by combining the local contrast mechanism with the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) calculation, an enhanced local contrast measurement is proposed to enhance the SCR of the infrared image while enhancing the suspected small target region. Second, an improved weighting function is proposed to enhance the target and suppress the background by taking advantage of the characteristics of the target in infrared images and the significant difference between the target and the surrounding background. Finally, an adaptive threshold segmentation method is used to extract real targets. Experimental results on different scene datasets show that compared with the seven existing methods, the proposed method can effectively extract real dim targets from interference objects under complex backgrounds and has better detection performance.